Synopsis

There’s a ghost in the walls, and V must decide if it is an ally or an enemy. The wrong decision could destroy her and her family. 

From Schneider Honor Award winning author Meg Eden Kuyatt comes a chilling and insightful novel-in-verse.

After a hard school year, V has been sent to her Grandma Jojo’s house for the summer in order to get away from it all. But unlike neurodivergent, artistic, sock-collecting V, Jojo is uptight, critical, and obsessed with her spotless house. She doesn’t get V at all. V is sure she’s doomed to have the worst summer ever.

Then V starts hearing noises from inside the walls of the house… Knocks, the sounds of a girl crying, and voices echoing in the night.

When V finds a ghostly girl hiding in the walls, they seem to have an immediate connection. This might be V’s chance to get back at her perfect grandmother by messing with her just a little bit.

But the buried secrets go much deeper — and are much more dangerous — than V even suspects. And they threaten to swallow her and her family whole if she can’t find a way to uncover the truth of the girl before it’s too late.

A contemporary novel-in-verse with a ghostly twist by the author of Good Different, this book is about the power — and danger — of secrets. The Girl in the Walls will grab you and not let go until the very last page.

Review

Huge thanks to Scholastic Press for the physical arc of this one! I was drawn right in with the cover art. 

This was fantastic. I expected to like it, as middle grade horror is usually a hit for me, but I really loved this. It’s a novel told in verse, which I did not know until I got it in the mail! It really cuts down on things we usually find necessary and proves that they aren’t always. Really concise, engaging, and moving. 

V, after getting into trouble at school, is left to spend the summer with her neat-manners-and-all-other-things-freak grandmother, Jojo. As V is different, neurodivergent and trying to find her own way, she’s always butted heads with Jojo, so being left feels like torture. Especially when V finds out her older cousin, Cat, who also doesn’t get along with Jojo, isn’t allowed over. You see, jojo wants everything perfectly prim, otherwise, what would the neighbors think? Yet V just wants to make art and wear silly, fancy socks. Most of all though, Vee wants to be accepted and understood. 

So when V finds a ghost of a girl living in Jojo’s walls, one who has been stockpiling her grandmother’s secrets, she finds it hard to say no to playing pranks with her. Even when the girl presses for darker and more intense pranks, disagreements between them push V toward giving in to the anger. If Jojo thinks so low of V, why shouldn’t she get back at her? 

Although the ghost ties back into the storyline itself in a ‘history coming back to haunt you’ way, I found that she served as a really good voice for V’s fears, angers, anxieties and even darker processing. Because of how in your face her harsh pranks are, she begins to serve more and more as the big meanie for young readers, doubling down on how wrong anger can be. And while the short pay off may feel good, what Vee really wants is her grandmother’s love. 

I found myself actually connecting things the grandmother said and did behaviorally to someone I’ve dealt with in the past. Especially the part about appearances. And this was a really unique way to see different sides to someone that maybe I didn’t think possible in real life. Everyone is multifaceted, and everyone has a past that influenced their present. It actually hit home for me, as I wasn’t allowing myself to view them as what they are just like Jojo didn’t view the real V. This one is light on the scary/horror side of things and real heavy on the emotional family turmoil side.

Synopsis

SPSFC 3 SEMIFINALIST
SPFBO 9 FINALIST
INDIE INK AWARDS FINALIST 

All Petre Mercy wanted was a good old-fashioned dramatic exit from his life as a prince. But it’s been five years since he fled home on a cyborg horse. Now the King – his Dad – is dead – and Petre has to decide which heir to pledge his thyroid-powered sword to.

As the youngest in a set of quadruplets, he’s all too aware that the line of succession is murky. His siblings are on the precipice of power grabs, and each of them want him to pick their side.

If Petre has any hope of preventing civil war, he’ll have to avoid one sibling who wants to take him hostage, win back another’s trust after years of rivalry and resentment, and get an audience with a sister he’s been avoiding for five years.

Before he knows it, he’s plunged himself into a web of intrigue and a world of strange, unnatural inventions just to get to her doorstep.

Family reunions can be a special form of torture.

“The Fall Is All There Is is a wonderfully weird, unapologetically unhinged, and darkly entertaining gendreblendy gem of a book. It throws all genre conventions and reader expectations straight out the window, and that is exactly where its irresistible charm lies.”
–Esmay Rosalyne, Fantasy Book Critic

Review

I received this to review for the Indie Ink Awards for neurodivergence and bisexual rep and decided to get the audiobook on audible as I’ve been behind and having trouble focusing on reading. Scott Fleming did a fantastic job that I really enjoyed. 

*I do want to add a disclaimer as the author is part of FanFi…I, of course, consider myself to be incredibly fair and level. And especially because the award is based of how the rep is written, and not my opinion of the book (regardless of how unbiased I aim to be) I do not see an issue.*

Every review I’ve ever seen for this book has talked about how unique it is. So let’s get the obvious out of the way. This is one of the most unique novels and genre blends I’ve ever read. It mixes science fiction aspects with a fantasy world, dialogue that feels more modern, and horror elements too. 

The characters use gas masks while outside of the major cities to save themselves from becoming gaunt. Aka breathing in ghost-like vapor and having their bodies taken over. Think kind of zombies, or evil entities a la the Shinigami in Never Die. The masks felt very scifi, while the nature of their need was wholly fantasy. Just one of the great blendings. 

The main character Petre, has a mental processing disorder, which leads him to need to get these implant injections. This kind of disability rep was something I’ve never read before, and the ‘cure’ (however temporary) was just another thing that felt so incredibly sci-fi in this fantasy world. He’s also a great example of bisexual rep as well, having desires for both men and women in a way that feels genuine. 

Another aspect of this novel that really knocked it out of the park was the way the author wrote the main characters. Not only are they siblings, they are quadruplets, so not everything is always good, but the bond is still unbreakable. Even if they wish it were. So when their father, the King, dies, naturally they can’t keep it together and behave amicably. The way in which the author writes their scenes together is so good, so believable, it’s almost as if the reader is experiencing the family arguments from the inside. As one of them. Or maybe it’s just because I am one of four kids myself. 

While I really enjoyed this, I was a bit surprised how the story didn’t really progress. That’s not the say that steps weren’t taken, or that there isn’t action, the plot itself just didn’t reach any kind of resolution. It almost kind of ends on the climax. Which instead of ruining it, definitely made me feel like I needed more immediately. I guess I just didn’t realize it wasn’t a standalone!

Hello all, and welcome to this week’s article for FanFiAddict’s series on Neurodivergence in Fiction. I cannot understate how appreciative I am for the overwhelming amount of support and enthusiasm I have seen for this series of mine; thank you! For the next several months we will be bringing you a guest post every Wednesday from a neurodivergent author. This will hopefully highlight some of the challenges that come with writing for a largely neurotypical audience, while also giving valuable insight to the craft itself and providing a window into the neurodivergent experience — at least through the lens of fiction.

Today, we are joined by Erika McCorkle, who talks about discovering neurodivergent traits in her characters and how creating worlds in which her characters can live free of judgement for being who they are has resulted in a sort of wish fulfillment.

As always, if you need to catch up on any articles, check out the landing page for the series here.

And, without further ado, here’s the article.

When I began writing my books, I didn’t know what autism was. I’d never heard of ADHD. I knew about dyslexia, but only because my uncle is dyslexic. “Neurodivergent” was not in my dictionary until nearly 15 years after I started writing.

But I always knew I was different. My grandma had always told me it was because I was smarter than most people. I had a good sense of time and order because I was observant and sharp, she would say. It wasn’t that I was bad at communicating with other kids, she claimed, it was that they were interested in hobbies that were below my standards. I wasn’t shy or quiet because of my inability to relate to them, just ‘reserved.’

Reserved. I grew up thinking that was what I was, because my grandma claimed it to be true. She knew so much, how could I doubt her? Maybe it was true. I wasn’t afraid of talking to the other kids in my class, I just didn’t know what to say. They watched movies and TV. I played video games. The girls like to play house and dress up. I liked to swing and imagine myself in fantasy worlds.

I always knew I was ‘weird’ but I never thought it was a bad thing. If anything, it was good. Thanks to my grandma’s support, I believed I was better than the other kids. So when I started making characters who were like me, who had similar thought processes as me, why would I have treated them as anything lesser? Why would their world treat their condition as an illness?

When I created my fantasy world, the Pentagonal Dominion, I was inspired by Pokemon and similar video games where creatures were categorized by types or elements. One of the elements I use is the “Mind” element. People who belong to that element, the Mind elementals, are meant to be smarter and more perceptive than the average person of a different element. They aren’t ‘better’, but they aren’t worse or stigmatized just for being born a Mind elemental, either.

However, part of why the Mind elementals aren’t bullied was for another reason: they’re the ones in power. I had crafted my world as a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy where those in power are knowledgeable and wise. The Mind elementals made for an obvious choice. If anything, the hatred for them comes from the commoners who are envious of their status, or from arrogant Mind elementals who do believe they’re holier than thou.

When I learned about neurodivergence, I reconsidered the Mind elementals’ ways of thinking. It wasn’t just that they’re smart. In fact, some of them aren’t super intelligent, but they have ‘quirks’ that I somehow knew were distinctively ‘Mind elemental.’ Mimi speaks in third-person, Lazurka is selectively mute, Neri cannot fathom telling lies, Medulla can’t focus on anything unless she’s hyperfixated on it, and Yume has no interest in living in the real world when she could instead delve into dreams.

Had they been autistic this entire time? It seemed so, although I hadn’t previously had the words to describe it. On the other hand, it had always been their normal state of being. In their eyes, neuro‘divergence’ is normal for Mind elementals and neuro‘typical’ is normal for non-Mind elementals. I couldn’t very well use those words, though. I couldn’t in good conscience call someone divergent when their thoughts were in line with their family and peers. I decided in lieu of words like autism, ADHD, neurodivergent, they would call it ‘thinking like a Mind elemental.’ That led to other issues, though. Not all Mind elementals were neurodivergent, and the non-Mind elementals who disliked Mind elementals would certainly not like that label. It struck me as being a potential microaggression, an act of ‘elementalism’ (the element form of racism or sexism). I needed something else.

That was when I heard about how the Māori had developed a word for autism: Takiwātanga, meaning “in his/her/their own time and space.” This resonated soooo much with me, perhaps because I had been mentally living in the Pentagonal Dominion for years by that point. I felt like I quite literally lived in my own time and space. Moreover, I could see how it applied to other autistic people, whether they created their own fantasy worlds or not. In their own way, they lived in their own time and space.

I didn’t want to use the exact Māori word, and the translation into English was good, but the people in the Pentagonal Dominion had other ways of expressing time and space. I changed the phrase into ‘in their own plane and timeline.’

That felt right. If a non-Mind elemental is autistic, there wouldn’t be any issues with saying they live in their own plane and timeline. Or at least, I don’t think there would be. Perhaps some would be miffed at the implication that they aren’t living in reality, but then perhaps they will come up with their own phrasing

I swear, I’m not always in charge of what my characters do. Sometimes the Pentagonal Dominionists exist on their own. I am sure there are other words and phrases used for neurodivergence in my fantasy world, but I have not yet created them. Or perhaps I haven’t discovered them. Some of these worldbuilding aspects have to come about naturally. I have to create them when the time is right. If I force them, they won’t be correct. I could not have forced ‘in their own plane and timeline’ prior to learning about takiwātanga. Perhaps in the future, I will write an autistic character and their special phrase will come to me only once I’ve channeled them, become them, immersed myself in their head, their plane and timeline. The labels one uses to describe oneself is so intimate that I cannot create them until I have delved into that character’s mind.

Lastly, I wanted to discuss how therapeutic it has been to write about a fantasy world where neurodivergent characters are loved and accepted. I’m currently drafting a novel with two autistic girls. The older of the two is based heavily on me, with many of the same traits I displayed when I was her age: stimming, meltdowns at what I perceived as injustices, furious anger when people made fun of me or my lisp, hyperfixations on insects, texture issues with food and clothing, and hypersensitivity to sounds and light. Writing this girl has put my childhood in a new light. Things I once thought were just my quirks are revealing themselves to be traits of autism I never noticed before. Writing her in a world where her quirks are normalized? Where her abilities are utilized in helpful ways? Where she’s not sent to speech therapy when she cannot even hear her own words to know that they’re ‘wrong’ (and where they aren’t wrong)? It’s therapeutic. Wish-fulfillment fantasy, perhaps, but it puts my soul at ease. Who’s to stop me from writing something that makes me happy? And if reading about her can make other autistic people happy, then that would thrill me, too.

Of the three books in my Merchants of the Pentagonal Dominion trilogy, two feature Mind elemental MCs, meaning they are both neurodivergent from a human perspective. But in their world, there’s nothing strange about how they act. If anything, they act the way others expect them to act. This is one thing I hope to portray in my writing: a world where autistic people are such an everyday occurrence that neurotypicals don’t see anything weird about them at all.

About the Author

Erika McCorkle is an author, avid world-builder, and consumer of all things fantasy, whether that be books, video games, or anime. Her debut novel, Merchants of Knowledge and Magic, will be available on April 8^th, 2022, from Shadow Spark Publishing. You can find her on Twitter @KiraoftheWind1. Her website is at www.authormccorkle.com.

Hello all, and welcome to this week’s article for FanFiAddict’s series on Neurodivergence in Fiction. I cannot understate how appreciative I am for the overwhelming amount of support and enthusiasm I have seen for this series of mine; thank you! For the next several months we will be bringing you a guest post every Wednesday from a neurodivergent author. This will hopefully highlight some of the challenges that come with writing for a largely neurotypical audience, while also giving valuable insight to the craft itself and providing a window into the neurodivergent experience — at least through the lens of fiction.

Today, we are joined by Alistair Caradec, who penned a wonderful article about how ADHD affects the way he writes.

As always, if you need to catch up on any articles, check out the landing page for the series here.

And, without further ado, here’s the article.

Here’s what my doctor said.

“From your answers, you certainly sound like you’d qualify for a diagnosis of ADHD. There are tests, but it’s a long process and, unfortunately, it’s not covered. It would cost you around fifteen hundred dollars. Unless you need the paperwork for your employer, it’s not very useful to go for the official test. I can prescribe you medication to help with your symptoms.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have fifteen hundred dollars. Another thing I don’t have, as a result, is an official diagnosis of ADHD.

Right. Now that that’s out of the way…

I used to have a Pocket Pikachu. Think Tamagotchi, but simpler. Can’t die. I like things that can’t die. I carried it everywhere, clipped on the waistband of my jeans. I loved that thing, and I retain a crystal-clear memory of the moment I lost it.

It was on a family outing at an aquarium, over the weekend. I went to use the restroom. Removed the Pocket Pikachu from my waistband. Set it down on the toilet paper holder. You know, that massive plastic thingamajig that keeps the extra rolls of paper so securely locked in that you wonder why they’re even there in the first place. I put the Pikachu on top of that, and as I put it on top of that, my brain quipped.

Do NOT set it down there. You will forget it.

I set it down there anyway.

I did my business. It must have taken two minutes, tops. As I pulled my pants back up, my brain quipped again.

Take it.

But first, I zipped and buttoned up.

Right. Now pick up the Pikachu.

But first, I flushed the toilet.

And left the cubicle.

Later during the day, I remembered, sort of. Half of my brain remembered. The other half, the one that’s in charge of the legs, kept right on with the aquarium visit. I didn’t forget it just once. I forgot it over and over. I kept on forgetting it until the sun came down and the aquarium closed and it was too little too late.

We were halfway home.

“Oh! Wait, no, I left my Pikachu!”

“Oh no, sweetie, you lost it?”

Except I hadn’t lost it. I’d left it. I hadn’t forgotten it. I’d neglected to pick it back up. Did I do that on purpose? Did I abandon it? Like a puppy by the side of the road? I loved that thing. Carried it everywhere. Clipped to the waistband of my jeans.

Friend, from the day I lost that Pikachu, there hasn’t been a single moment of my life when I haven’t known for a fact that I am lazy, neglectful, and immature.

Back in 2008, not to brag, I graduated with the highest scores in my entire high school. This surprised nobody. I had what my teachers, in France, used to call “des facilités”. You might say I was high achieving, gifted, a smart cookie.

I was very aware of the privilege, of course, and suitably ashamed. I had it easy, and was told as much. Couldn’t argue, really, the results spoke for themselves, and I knew to keep my head down. With an apologetic smile, I reassured friends and classmates that grades didn’t mean anything in the real world, and certainly didn’t equal intelligence.

“How long did you study for that A+?”

And me, not having opened the textbook at all, “Oh, uh, you know, a couple of hours.”

“Man, you’re so lucky! I studied all weekend and I barely got a C!”

“I know, I’m sorry. It’s not fair.”

I meant it, but it still stung when they agreed, when they confirmed that I was, in fact, undeserving of my success. That I would have been undeserving of it even if I had put in “a couple of hours”. Which I hadn’t. Which, in all honesty, I couldn’t have done if I’d needed to.

But I didn’t need to, so I didn’t need help. I couldn’t have ADHD because I didn’t have symptoms. What I had were flaws.

You might be a writer yourself, in which case you’ll know there are different kinds of flaws. There’s the cool ones you give to your protagonist. Stubbornness, anger, pride, potentially lethal yet delightfully quirky clumsiness. And then there’s the unfashionable ones. The ones that are too ugly to even inflict upon your classy main villain. Gluttony, incompetence, sloth.

My flaws were hideous.

Lazy.

Neglectful.

Immature.

My flaws were my dirty little secret, my cardinal sins. I did my best to hide them, of course. Failed, sometimes, and I keep a neat little folder in my brain of these failures. “Si tu t’y prenais pas toujours à la dernière minute, aussi!” “Mais qu’elle est conne, celle-là!” “Alors, Gwendoline. Amoureuse?” “Sois un peu responsable, enfin! C’est pas sérieux, ça!”

Now, I don’t know how this works. I’m no professional, and as I said, I don’t have a formal diagnosis of ADHD. From where I was standing, though? It sure seemed to be getting worse.

Unmedicated, undetected, kind of sort of mildly drowning just a little bit – nothing major, can’t complain, really, I have it easy, you know, comparatively and all – sure enough, reading went from this…

… to this.

By this point, I had a master’s degree in creative writing. First class. I was going to be an author. Possibly a damn good one, too.

Well, I stopped reading. No exaggeration, I didn’t read a single novel in six years. Never mind writing. My career was dead on arrival. And the blame? The blame was easy to place.

They say success is ten percent talent and ninety percent hard work.

I knew I had the aptitude. So I’d been told, and couldn’t argue. The results spoke for themselves. Logically, the effort had to be lacking. Lazy.

And then I found this.

Lazy?

I looked into it.

Negligent?

I read a novel in three days.

Immature?

Tentatively, I started writing again, and noticed a slight shift. The brush strokes were more confident – better, if I may say so myself. Not because I had ADHD, not even because I was suddenly aware I had ADHD, but because I’d stopped trying to hide it. More and more, my symptoms started showing in my writing, and instead of backing away in shame, I leaned into them.

This is what writing with ADHD looks like:

 I like music. Oh.

Ahem.

A melody is, to me at least, much easier to recall than a paragraph of prose. Much easier to parse. I doubt I’m the only one. There has to be a reason for the iambic pentameter. I explored rhythm, more and more, and sometimes at the expense of traditional grammar.

Today, I can honestly say that I feel connected to my voice, which makes improving it a lot more fun.

That’s in terms of results, and it keeps me going. Good thing it does, too, because the process is where I’m still struggling. A lot. ADHD isn’t a superpower, I’ll tell you that. Most of the time, it’s a hindrance.

Sometimes I sit and stare, unfocused, blurry, for hours. I know now that this is called brain fog. I remember trying to name it, years ago, back when I had flaws instead of symptoms. In the middle of an episode I reached for a pencil and scribbled on the corner of a page: “My head is full of very cumbersome emptiness.” White noise. Nothing, but loud.

Sometimes it feels like a superpower. That’s a trap. That’s when my husband gets concerned. “You haven’t said anything all afternoon. Love, have you eaten anything today?” Possibly not the healthiest, but I can’t take a break, can I, because yesterday I was sitting and staring for hours. Surely that should come out of my break time.

There’s also thirty years of stigma to unpack. Sometimes, the old brain just sort of… you know…

You haven’t written in weeks. Lazy.

Why didn’t you research this ahead of time? Negligent.

That’s not how the world works! What are you, twelve? Immature.

A few months ago, when I shook and buckled and my husband suggested a gentle “It’s very hard for you to allow yourself to have a mental illness, isn’t it?”, I broke down crying. Okay, so I was already crying at that point. I cried harder, okay? Jesus.

If I’m honest. I’m not all that keen on the whole “neurodivergent” versus “neurotypical” terminology. Is that a terrible thing to say?

Obviously, I’m not here to take that away from anyone. I do understand how important it is, especially for so many who grew up thinking they were sick or stupid or something to that effect. “Neurodivergent” is more “you’re not like most people”, less “something is wrong with you”, and that’s beautiful.

I was told that I’m not like most people. I was told I was a special little snowflake and I better shut my mouth and fly under the radar because nobody likes a special snowflake. You have it easy. It’s not fair. Shut up.

World’s smallest violin? Probably. Tell you what, though. Without any attempt at preaching, without projecting my personal experience onto anyone else. Just me to you, plain and simple and matter-of-fact. I need to be able to say that something is wrong with me. I need to be allowed to have difficulties, a mental illness, a psychiatric disorder.

That’s, uh… That’s okay, right?

About the Author

Alistair grew up on the stories his dad read him at night, classical music whenever his mum sat at the piano, and the role playing games he made up with his brother and cousins. Much of his childhood was spent exploring the fields behind his parents’ house.

In his writing, Alistair routinely treats speculative fiction as he would a slice-of-life drama. And makes it queer. After years in France and years in the UK, he settled on the East Coast of Canada with his husband and their twenty plushies.

Author website: https://alistaircaradec.com/

To preorder my debut novel, The Old Love and the New:  https://books2read.com/TheOldLoveAndTheNew (note that while this says “ebook stores”, it is possible to preorder a paperback from Amazon or Barnes & Nobles)

Twitter: @AlistairCaradec

Hello all, and welcome to this week’s article for FanFiAddict’s series on Neurodivergence in Fiction. I cannot understate how appreciative I am for the overwhelming amount of support and enthusiasm I have seen for this series of mine; thank you! For the next several months we will be bringing you a guest post every Wednesday from a neurodivergent author. This will hopefully highlight some of the challenges that come with writing for a largely neurotypical audience, while also giving valuable insight to the craft itself and providing a window into the neurodivergent experience — at least through the lens of fiction.

Today, we are joined by AK Nephtali with a wonderful article about how they both embrace and subvert stereotypes around autism in their writing.

As always, if you need to catch up on any articles, check out the landing page for the series here.

And, without further ado, here’s the article.

There are many stereotypes plaguing the autistic community: that we all have social skills so bad we’d be unable to convince a person to continue breathing, the empathy of a rock, the fashion sense of a colour-blind old man, and that we’re all white, cis, straight men.

All of this contributes to autistic people, especially women, POC, and femme-presenting people getting late diagnoses or staying undiagnosed their entire lives. And it contributes to a narrow portrayal of autism in fiction, where autistic people aren’t allowed to be, well, people. Autistic people often claim characters who are autistic coded, because they are allowed to be full characters, and the characters confirmed to be autistic are often written by neurotypicals with little understanding of who we truly are, and are shallow, robotic portrayals.

As an example of an autistic person who breaks stereotypes, I present yours truly. I’m AK Nephtali, I’m a seventeen-year-old autistic writer, and I’m a trans, Jewish, ace-aro non binary man. Autistic people are seven times more likely to be gender variant. Likely because gender is a social construct, and we’re not good at picking up on meaningless social rules.

CAHMS refused to diagnose me as autistic because I demonstrated empathy and theory of mind, but I was, thankfully, professionally diagnosed at the Evelina clinic three years later. Not every autistic person has the privilege of getting diagnosed.

All this preamble is so you can understand my fears about having an autistic character who breaks the stereotypes.

I fear that neurotypicals will refuse to believe he is autistic, much like how many people have said “but you don’t look autistic” to me when I say I’m autistic.

And I also fear that people will say he’s too stereotypical in other areas: that he rocks, hums, carries around a Rubik’s cube, even though many autistic people are genuinely like this.

Currently, books like The Curious Dog and The Incident at Nighttime and characters like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory provide neurotypicals with a shallow understanding of autism. One of the most pernicious stereotypes is the idea that we lack empathy.

There is some truth to this. We do, on average, lack cognitive empathy. Because our brains are wired differently, and when we’re in public we have to deal with a barrage of painful sensations, it’s difficult to understand other’s intentions. About half of us have alexithymia, where we find it difficult to notice what we’re feeling and put names to our emotions.

But, many autistic people experience hyper-empathy, a strong form of affective empathy. Affective empathy is feeling what others feel. Autistic people can have such strong affective empathy that we  form attachments to inanimate objects, and it’s part of why we tend to notice injustices in the world and seek to right them. Some autistic people find it hard to watch movies because they feel pain when the characters are hurt or embarrassed. I remember picking up worms from the sidewalk and placing them in the grass, where they’d be safe and wouldn’t dry out. I covered them with a leaf so the birds wouldn’t find them.

My character Asran has hyper empathy like I do, and like many autistic people do. He’s apologized to a vase he accidently knocked over. He can’t listen in to recitations of the Xrache (a religious doctrine present in my world) because he has nightmares when he hears the punishments listed for disobeying. He cares deeply about others, wants to become a diplomat, likes to listen to people speak, and wants a friend more than anything else in the world.

Asran is the heart of the group – the character who brings everyone together with his kindness.

He has alexithymia too. Just because someone can’t always put a name to their emotions doesn’t mean they don’t feel them. A quote from the book:

“Strong emotions overwhelmed him. They were incomprehensible, just noise, and not like a noise that faded into the background after you became accustomed to it. They were loud. Unbearably loud. So loud he couldn’t tell what it was, only that it was.”

Because of his kindness and sensitivity, many neurotypicals won’t be able to understand that he’s autistic. I’ll need to have full control over the blurb, and make sure that he is described as autistic, otherwise neurotypical people uneducated about autism won’t get it. It’s through no fault of their own that they’ve been exposed to misleading information. Some neurotypicals will cling to stereotypes and refuse to believe he is autistic despite all of this anyway, but I’m not writing for them.

I want to subvert the myth that autistic people are cold and unfeeling. While some are, that doesn’t stop them from being good people either. People with high cognitive empathy can use that to manipulate others around them. People with high affective empathy can have false ideas on how to fix others, and hurt people because they won’t listen and try to help people who don’t need help or want it. People with low affective and cognitive empathy can have a strong moral code and use it to help others.

Asran is, in many ways, the complete opposite of the stereotypes of an autistic person. He’s non binary, intersex, a person of colour who wears his hair in intricate braids and cornrows. He loves books and hates math. In other ways, he’s similar. He’s a geek with a terrible fashion sense, and he rocks and hums when stressed to calm himself.

 “…he readjusted his kivut to face the right way. It confused him that there should be a right way. The purpose of clothes was to cover, and the kivut did that whatever direction it faced.”

I’ve written him as whole person. Some parts of him fit the stereotypes, but most of him exists outside of that. Even the parts of him that exist within the stereotypes are subverted, because you understand why he acts the way he does. When prejudiced neurotypicals write about stereotypical autistic behavior, such as rocking and humming, they don’t understand why we do it. They make autistic characters act like that to dehumanize us and present us as strange and other. I write about those stereotypical behaviors to shed light on them and help neurotypical people understand and autistic people relate.

I’m not avoiding all the stereotypes, becahuse that wouldn’t be writing him as a whole person either. Forcing all of him into a mold and forcing all of him out of a mold – both of these don’t allow him to be a full person.

About the Author

AK Nephtali is a British nonbinary chaos gremlin masquerading as a human. They are currently working on a high fantasy novel about alien mermaids, and run a blog while sitting down.

They’ve been interviewed on @eclecticallylyn‘s blog about building confidence as an autistic person. Link here: how to encourage positivity and build confidence in your awesome autistic – awesome autistics

Blog: QuillQuestions.com
Twitter: @quillquestions

Hello all, and welcome to this week’s article for FanFiAddict’s series on Neurodivergence in Fiction. I cannot understate how appreciative I am for the overwhelming amount of support and enthusiasm I have seen for this series of mine; thank you! For the next several months we will be bringing you a guest post every Wednesday from a neurodivergent author. This will hopefully highlight some of the challenges that come with writing for a largely neurotypical audience, while also giving valuable insight to the craft itself and providing a window into the neurodivergent experience — at least through the lens of fiction.

Today, we are joined by Amara Lynn, who raises the question of who exactly they’re writing for.

As always, if you need to catch up on any articles, check out the landing page for the series here.

And, without further ado, here’s the article.

Last year for NaNoWriMo, I went all out and wrote my first full novel (something I’d never achieved on a first draft before). It’s the current book of my heart (yes, you can have more than one in your life), and probably the most “me” thing to be ever written.

Now, I don’t know what to do with it.

The thing is, even though I think my story is great and other people have replied to me on Twitter before with how much they can’t wait to read it, the publishing industry has convinced me it doesn’t want my book.

Why?

Because it’s weird. Because it’s queer, with an all genderqueer cast. Most of all, because I broke all the writing “rules”. I wrote the book I wanted to write. Because of my neurodivergence, my mind often processes things differently.

Four years ago, I didn’t even know how to write a book. I just wrote things and had fun with no regard to anything else. But then I finished something, and submitted it to a collection call with a small press, and I had a rude awakening.

Suddenly, I was in this whole world of show versus tell, don’t do this, don’t do that, and I was rewriting my novella into something else entirely just to make it all make sense. While what I ended up with is undoubtedly better than the original, it was a horrible experience that left me with anxiety. 

I used to think that everyone struggled to fit in, that everyone was surely faking concern or sincerity. But the more I interacted with other neurodivergent people, the more apparent it became to me that most people don’t have to think so hard about what others think, or pretend, or hold in their weird random thoughts. Just like I had to learn the “right way” to write a book, I’ve had to learn the right way to interact with other people.

Since neurodivergent people are in the minority, the majority of readers a publisher will be marketing to are neurotypical. In other words, they aren’t going to want to throw money into something they believe won’t sell. So the answer is, “your character can still be X (neurodivergent, queer, disabled, etc)”, but “you have to make it have mass market appeal as well” or “You have to make it educate people on issues.”

Even though I didn’t write my book primarily for them. I wrote my book for everyone who desperately wants to feel at home, to have a place they belong and feel comfortable. I wrote my book because of everyone who said I can’t.

And it hasn’t always been this way. I often read classics, being a fan of retellings, to inspire me. Take Alice in Wonderland for example. Lewis Caroll invented so, so many gibberish words (and you can bet I did just that in my retelling), and some of them even made their way into normal English. Chortle (laugh in a breathy, gleeful way; chuckle) is one example. Furthermore, there are several more examples of what would be considered bad writing by today’s standards, such as telling “she was angry” or exposition. And Lewis Caroll isn’t the only one. I recently read The Little Mermaid as well, and was surprised by how short it was, on top of more of the same exposition. In fact, exposition is more common in fairy tales, and that’s what so many people grew up on, but when you pick up a new book all of a sudden no one writes like that anymore. People grow up, forget these stories, and learn rules of modern storytelling.

Add that on top of so many other things neurotypical people seem to know, and all of a sudden, writing a book seems like a much bigger feat for someone like me. This became more clear to me recently when I had the opportunity to be paired up in a critique partner match. Both of the potential people failed to connect with my first chapter. One wanted to make changes I’d liken to line edits, calling out my telling statements that were intentional for impact, while the other failed to connect altogether. As far as I know, both individuals were neurotypical. After this, I reached out to some friends who were privy to my story during drafting, and none of them raised the same issues.

This is when I started to be concerned. Who did I write this story for? How many people won’t understand this story, written for queer and neurodiverse people, and what obstacles will that cause for me? When you’ve poured so much of yourself into a story, given so much of your soul, you don’t want to change it for anyone. You want everything for it, while also preserving what the story is at its heart.

As I pondered these differing opinions from neurotypical people and queer people, a friend of mine from Twitter expressed frustrations with the publishing industry around his former agent and also regulary tweets about navigating the publishing industry with ADHD. Something he said recently involved my fears: that editors will want to edit out inside jokes and other voice quirks. Yet those are what I think makes my book truly unique.

Even though I’m currently a self published indie author, I’m also a dreamer with big dreams some days. I would love for one of my books to get more attention, or to get more sales. The biggest struggle for being an indie author is you have to do your own marketing, and that in itself is a whole job. Put that on top of working a full time job as well, and my chronic illness, and there just isn’t enough time in the day to do all that I would need to do. Marketing is its own beast that I’m constantly trying to understand, and more often than not, failing at.

It’s hard not to feel left out when you’re an indie author on social media and people keep talking about the same few bestsellers, or the lack of rep in the industry, and us indies are over here screaming “We’re right here!” I wish people would treat indie books with the same amount of hype as trad pub books. There are some great ones out there that deserve it.

I would love to have the help of an agent or publishing house, but not at the cost of getting a bad editor who tries to make my book something it’s not. And I don’t plan on writing anything less quirky, whimsical, or weird, either. I don’t want to have to change myself to sell books. Sometimes I just want to throw my books out in the world and if one person likes them, great. But sometimes I’m tired of doing it all myself, and I shouldn’t have to just for fear of rejection.

One thing I’m fortunate enough to have is a freelance editor who is also queer, and understands when something one of my characters does is a neurodivergent thing. It even helped me with my most recent book address narrative changes to differentiate between my characters that aren’t neurodivergent. In trad pub, my biggest fear is that I wouldn’t get so lucky. That I’d have another horrible experience that overwhelms me and induces anxiety attacks. And no editor or critique partner should ever make you feel that way.

Some days I’m so grateful to have creative control and freedom. Some days I want more, because at heart I’m a dreamer.

Maybe the industry will change if we talk about these things more, in time. Maybe one day I’ll get lucky, too. As for me in the present, all I can keep doing for now is writing my heart out, revising my work, and staring off into space as I contemplate the answers to these questions myself. 

About the Author

Amara Lynn has always been a quiet daydreamer. Coming up with characters and worlds since childhood, Amara eventually found an outlet in writing. Amara loves anything to do with pirates, villains and superheroes, and angels and demons.

Amara is addicted to music and gets the most inspiration from moving songs and lyrics. When not writing, Amara usually reads, listens to podcasts, watches anime, plays a video game here and there (but mostly collects them), and takes way too many cat pictures.

Amara is non-binary/enby and queer and uses they/them pronouns.

Website: www.amarajlynn.com 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmaraJLynn

Books: amarajlynn.com/books

Hello all, and welcome to this week’s article for FanFiAddict’s series on Neurodivergence in Fiction. I cannot understate how appreciative I am for the overwhelming amount of support and enthusiasm I have seen for this series of mine; thank you! For the next several months we will be bringing you a guest post every Wednesday from a neurodivergent author. This will hopefully highlight some of the challenges that come with writing for a largely neurotypical audience, while also giving valuable insight to the craft itself and providing a window into the neurodivergent experience — at least through the lens of fiction.

(Note: I have opened up the series to non-authors and those with other mental health issues.)

This week, we are joined by fellow blogger and forthcoming debut author, Rowena Andrews! I think that this is a very important addition to the NiD series because it details their journey toward acceptance of themselves and that’s something that everyone can learn a lesson from.

As always, if you need to catch up on any articles, check out the landing page for the series here.

And, without further ado, here’s the article.

I do not like labels, I never have. Part of me has always rebelled at them because I am more than a mere word, or a phrase or any other way you want to stick something to me. Another part of me, wanted to hide from them because being different was ‘dangerous’ and threatened to draw a spotlight that I didn’t want for many reasons. But, I WAS different – I just refused to acknowledge it and went out of my way to adjust so that I wouldn’t draw attention to it, telling myself that it was just a ‘quirk’. Not 100% ‘normal’ whatever that means, but nothing noteworthy. Nothing that needed to be taken note of.

My ‘quirk’ was with words – whether reading, writing or listening.

I’ve always muddled letters, especially ‘m’ and ‘b’ and ‘o’ and ‘i’.

I’ve always had terrible handwriting, to the point where I can’t read it half the time.

I’ve always had to reread things because I’ve just skipped over part of what’s written on the page without meaning to.

It made and continues to make life challenging, but for over half my life that’s just what it was – a quirk or an annoyance depending on my mood.  It was something I learned to work around from an early age, and maybe that’s why even now that I have the ‘label’ I still consider it a quirk because it’s how I grew up seeing it.  I worked with it, largely because I had to. Books and reading were my escape from a less than ideal home situation, and there was a lot of expectation on me to do well at school. To be normal. To offset what was happening at home. To make sure eyes were elsewhere.  I was and still am a voracious reader. I was the child who sped through the reception level boxes of books, tore through the tiny school library and soon commandeered all the library cards in the house to have access to more books. I wanted to live in those books, and a ‘quirk’ wasn’t going to get in the way of that.

I would reread things over and over to make sure that I understood it, especially if I was going to be asked about it at school. I would stay up far too late trying to memorise things for spelling tests, or if we were having to read aloud, because I knew I would make mistakes and get pulled up for it. That it would get attention. I learned to hide errors when I was speaking aloud with coughs, and to write even more messily than I did anyway to try and hide the spelling mistakes. After all, if they can’t see it, it doesn’t exist right?

But, it’s not one of those things that you can ever hide completely.

I’m in year 4 and getting pulled up for writing ‘shit’ instead of ‘sheet’ again,  and looking at the page…and not understanding the difference.

I’m in year 7, getting pulled up for ‘careless spelling’ and terrible handwriting, even though my grades are still good.

I’m in year 11 and trying to revise and realising that none of the methods we’re being advised to use work for me, but the teachers just tell me to keep trying them.

I’m in my last year of college, taking extra A-levels to fill the time before uni, and I’ve just been handed pre-release material for an exam on bright pink paper.

I can’t read it.

Well, no. I can read it, but I couldn’t tell you anything about what I’ve just ‘read’, and I was sat in class unable to answer the questions and wondering for the first time what the hell is wrong with me because this isn’t a just a quirk anymore.

I was lucky, my tutor for that class knew me and that I was almost obsessive about learning, and so I found myself across in the college learning support centre almost immediately. Testing followed, and lo and behold at eighteen years old I had a name for my ‘quirk’

Dyslexia.

I will say that the testing was challenging, or rather the attitude was. Perhaps because I’d already gone through one lot of A-levels and all those years of school without being ‘noticed’ or because of how it had finally come to light. It wasn’t a great experience. Nor was one of the responses I got to it, where I was referred to as a ‘backwards dyslexic’ because a lot of the aids they tried to introduce me to involved colour, and colours – as that exam paper had proven are my nemesis. I’ve never been able to get on with mindmaps, or different coloured notes – all the revision methods we were told to use and I hated. It was not the best turn of phrase and one that stuck with me for a long time afterwards, and there I was not only with my ‘quirk’ exposed to the world but also getting told I was different from the difference.

It was a strange moment.  On the one hand, I had answers and I hadn’t suddenly lost my ability to read – which for one terrifying moment in that Law class I had thought was what had happened. I also had an explanation for how my mind worked. On the other hand, I had a label that I didn’t want, and one that apparently I didn’t fit neatly under – the understanding that it was a spectrum coming much later.

It also felt like proof that the spotlight was bad, although the reasons I’d had for hiding it while growing up were gone.

It didn’t stop me from going to university though. I already had my methods for working around it, habits built up over the years and I loved learning and knew that I could do it. Yet, those words haunted me, and so I hid again. I never mentioned on my application that I had dyslexia. I never asked for aids. It was easier and harder than it had been in school. Here, my revision habits were my own – there was no one judging as I veered away from the visual methods, although they were still the ones that dominated in revision help sessions. While so much of the learning was independent that I could work at my own pace, and reread as much as I needed. However, there were other challenges. Presentations were an essential part of the course – which meant powerpoints and colour. If I was on my own, I just accepted I would lose some marks for having a less than visually appealing presentation, but if I was in a group, I kept silent – printed it off in black and white and tried to work from that. I did better on presentations where I had no notes because as soon as I try to read aloud I get muddled and so I was back to memorising things again, and sighing when the rest of the group commented on my lack of notes, or when the lecturer pulled me up about it.

I graduated. I started working.  I never mentioned my dyslexia on any of the forms.

I was still hiding.

The change came when I started writing properly again. I’ve always written stories, I still have the novel I wrote when I was fourteen lurking somewhere. Mostly it was private and just for me, a way to get the ideas out of my head, and something I could do without worrying about other people judging my handwriting and spelling because no one was going to see it. Then I fell into fandom, and I was writing stories and posting them online and actually interacting with people who were reading my words. For the most part, it was great, to see the emotional reactions, to hear that people liked what I was doing, but there’s always going to be some dissenting voices.

Someone decided to have a go at me about the muddled letters – the fact that I had used ‘be’ instead of ‘me’ on more than one occasion, and to this day I’m not sure if they caught me on a good day or a bad day, or what made me sit up and state quite simply ‘I’m dyslexic’ and while I do edit it to the best of my ability, some things will slip through.

It was like a pebble starting an avalanche, although not as quick. It’s not something that could change overnight. After all, I had been hiding it since I was in primary school, and that’s a lot of ‘habit’ to unlearn.

Then I started postgrad and suddenly I was having to do presentations again and my anxiety spiked because I remembered the hell those had been at times. But this time, I raised the fact that I was dyslexic and the issues I had, feeling sick to my stomach the entire time and waiting for the judgement and comments. No one blinked an eye.  Instead, they asked me what worked for me, and went out of their way to let me submit my work in ways that played to my strengths and made the whole process that much more accessible. I wasn’t a ‘backwards dyslexic’, I was just dyslexic… I  had a different way of working, and as long as I did the work like any other student, that was all that mattered.

I was twenty-seven and I accepted that I was dyslexic.

Now the avalanche was really moving. I was what I was, and it wasn’t earthshattering in the negative sense that I had always expected. I told my work, and for the most part, they’re good at avoiding lots of colours and are happy to accept changes to presentations etc, to make them more accessible to me. I was writing more and more, and reading a lot more, because there was no more need to hide.

Just a need to make adjustments, but those are habits long ingrained.

As a blogger, it means that when I read a book, I have to allow time for re-reading at least 25% of the book, because my brain will just skip over parts and I will stop and not know what’s happened for the last half dozen pages and I have to go back. Or I will misread something that changes the meaning completely, and come up short in utter confusion. I find physical copies easier to read than digital, and they’re also easier to flip back to where I lost track, and when I’m tired I will generally switch to a paperback – so I have to factor in that when scheduling reads. It means I have to double, triple and sometimes quadruple check my reviews and even then the chances of a typo slipping through are very high because sometimes I just don’t register the error, and there is some irony in the fact that ‘book’ is one of my misspelt words. There have been days where I can spend 10-15 minutes trying to correct just one word because I will make the same error over and over again, even though I know it’s wrong and what I’m trying to correct it to. Those are the days when I have to walk away and take a break.

As a writer, it means accepting that I am going to misspell things sometimes to the point where even the computer can’t work out what I was trying to say and I have now learned to turn the spell-check off while I work so that I don’t get caught up trying to fix things as I go. It also means that I loathe copy editing with a fiery, burning passion because I know that I will inevitably add in more errors while correcting the ones that exist, which is why I outsource for that aspect of the process. It also means that certain things like author readings, are not something I will ever be comfortable doing, which is a shame because I love listening to them.

If I’m particularly tired or stressed, then all those issues will be worse and I’ve learned to accept that those days are not ones for writing – or sometimes even reading if it’s a particularly bad one – and I will use those days for research, making graphics or laying out posts on the blog. It’s still progress, which satisfies the part of me that wants to work and focus, but it draws attention away from the fact that the words won’t behave.

I’m a blogger. I’m a writer. I’m dyslexic. Why should one stand in front of the others?

It’s still just a quirk, only now it’s got a technical name and sometimes it makes life that little bit more complicated – and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

About the Author

Rowena Andrews spent her childhood searching for Dragons and talking to animals and started turning that into words when she was bored in class. She wrote her first book at fourteen and while it lives forever in the bottom of the sock drawer, the encouragement from her English Teacher meant the writing bug took hold and never went away.

Rowena has a BSc in Geography and a PG Diploma in Coastal and Maritime Societies and Cultures. She moved to Scotland for University, fell in love with the place and never left, and now lives and works on the east Fife coast.

When she’s not writing or reading, she’s hoarding dice and playing Dungeons & Dragons, and submitting to the whims of a demanding cat and dog duo.

Blog: https://beneathathousandskies.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/R_M__Andrews

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21582730.Rowena_Andrews

Amazon: mybook.to/TheRavynsWords

Hello all, and welcome to this week’s article for FanFiAddict’s series on Neurodivergence in Fiction. I cannot understate how appreciative I am for the overwhelming amount of support and enthusiasm I have seen for this series of mine; thank you! For the next several months we will be bringing you a guest post every Wednesday from a neurodivergent author. This will hopefully highlight some of the challenges that come with writing for a largely neurotypical audience, while also giving valuable insight to the craft itself and providing a window into the neurodivergent experience — at least through the lens of fiction.

(Note: I have opened up the series to non-authors and those with other mental health issues.)

This week, we have something a little different for you. Author Matthew Wilcox is here to talk a little about writing neurodivergent characters as a neurotypical person and how you can avoid some common pitfalls in writing outside of your personal experience.

As always, if you need to catch up on any articles, check out the landing page for the series here.

And, without further ado, here’s the article.

Nobody hands out medals to parents at pediatric epilepsy units. There are no parades thrown for them at wheelchair clinics. And I have never been asked to pose for a statue simply because I feel love for my neurodivergent child. This has all been quite disappointing to me, as I’m sure you can imagine, being a parent of a child with disabilities caused by epilepsy and developmental delay. A lifetime of watching puff news stories, TV movies, and online inspirational video clips taught me to expect such things. It’s a shame, really. I would look wonderful as a statue.

As a neurotypical author, an inspirational narrative of “overcoming disability” is a tempting one to write. In this common narrative, a typical person learns to accept someone else after that different person overcomes said differences to achieve something deemed important. Especially when that accomplishment, from climbing Everest to scoring the game-winning touchdown, is done “in spite of” their differences. It’s emotionally gratifying, tears flow like rain, and it’s the kind of story everybody’s aunt just loves. It has all the classic elements of storytelling–there’s adversity, people do something, they succeed, then all are inspired and happily move on. A very formal, professional format. When my son was admitted to the hospital at 11 months old and diagnosed with Infantile Spasms, that was the kind of narrative myself and everyone around us wanted as well. I started realizing how much other people came to expect it in the months and years that followed when they asked, “Is Rowan better?” instead of, “How is Rowan?” That ever-so-slight difference in wording spoke to their need for a triumphant resolution. 

As writers of fiction, our characters usually face challenges they need to resolve. They seek fame and fortune, need to defeat a dragon, want the high school band to make sectionals, whatever. And for neurotypical writers, it is very easy to see disabilities or neurological differences as yet more challenges that must be “defeated” in order for characters to succeed in their stories. This is the almost instinctive impulse you must fight as an author so you can plunge into the depths of your characters’ reasonings and ultimately write a much more interesting story.

Based on my personal experiences raising a child with epilepsy that caused cognitive delay, I wrote my first novel, Last Hope For Hire, about a retired mercenary earning money to pay for expensive medical treatments for his son. I desperately wanted to write a book and somehow take control of my life after leaving work to care for my son. When I started writing, Rowan was still having seizures due to a destructive brainwave pattern that was also causing cognitive decline. I could hardly think about anything else, so I merged my constant worry with my writing desires and got to work. Not long after starting, however, I realized that epilepsy, like autism and other diagnoses with large umbrellas, can include a number of behaviors and daily realities that each have to be thought of in terms of whether they are problems for the character with the diagnosis or merely “problems” for those around the character.

Here’s an example of what I mean: seizures and hypsarrhythmia (a disruptive brain wave pattern) = bad. They are very, very bad for the character as far as health, happiness, and even that character’s life. Needing a wheelchair = not as clear. Neurotypicality and ableism tell me to reject the wheelchair and consider a character “confined” if he or she needs one. On the other hand, my son’s wheelchair allows us to take him most places his able-bodied sister can go, and many days he scoots over and reaches up to tell us he wants to go sit in his wheelchair. He would never for one instant consider his wheelchair a problem that needed to be solved. Another good example can be a character who is non-verbal, as my son also is. To me, his lack of verbal communication is frustrating when he is upset and cannot tell me why. But most days my son is not bothered by his own inability to speak using words. It’s not something he considers as lacking in his daily experience. With this in mind, if I were translating my son into a character, I would never have him think something along the lines of, If only I could speak! As authors, we can’t assume that our fears about being different are the same as those who actually have those differences. 

And yet, of course, characters may have opinions on anything you as the author wish. If you want to write a character with frustrations over every kind of difference you can imagine–go nuts. Throw in a hatred of paper straws while you’re at it. Your characters do not need to be respectful of disabilities, neurological differences, or cognitive development. But you as the author absolutely must be. I use the word “respectful” because I think it makes the idea of neurotypical authors writing about characters with neurological differences more attainable than even “knowledgeable” because the first term will naturally lead to the second. It’s the same idea as when you’re writing characters who are a different gender and/or ethnicity as yourself. Your primary goal should be to avoid egregious, disastrous misrepresentations above all else. It’s my own Wood Shop Philosophy. You can know every in and out of a bandsaw, but if you don’t respect that thing then bad things are going to happen. 

I’ll give a specific example of what I’m talking about as far as respecting differences as an author. In Last Hope For Hire, two parents are trying to help their son fight epilepsy while also coming to terms with the disabilities it has caused. There’s a flippant phrase that bounces around Facebook along the lines of, “God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle.” I find that phrase offensive. For me, it totally glosses over the pain of having every fundamental expectation and concept of parenthood shift against your will, and the work of adjusting your thinking to match. It trivializes the thoughts and fears parents struggle with even against their better natures, from accepting a child that cannot speak or even make eye contact to considering the value of continuing treatment in the face of constant medical decline. To say them out loud would tarnish the angelic narrative around kids with disabilities and their families, and so we don’t dare openly express them. I wanted to make sure these ideas were dealt with in my story, so I included them as part of the father character’s point-of-view. But I also needed to add elements that balanced out the father’s negative thoughts so the reader doesn’t walk away thinking that I, as the author, am advocating for the rejection of people with disabilities. It would make for bad storytelling, and respect tells me there are different viewpoints that must be demonstrated. So in addition, the mother character speaks about accepting the child that came to her, epilepsy and all, as she prepares herself for the possibility that the damaging illness may never be controlled. And having another character with a physical disability who uses a wheelchair allowed me to further demonstrate that my story was about fighting a child’s epilepsy and not about the total rejection of anyone atypical. 

My final bit of advice, if you’ll indulge me, is to analyse your go-to phrases as a writer. As I mentioned earlier, “confined” is a word often used in combination with describing a character who uses a wheelchair. Other terms that extend to describing neurodivergent characters that I also had to be careful of using were terms like “trapped,” “imprisoned,” “in a daze,” etc. It’s easy to slip these terms into your narrative writing without realizing the judgement they carry. To avoid this, I tried my best to describe what my cognitively-delayed child character was doing rather than make a neurotypical assumption. Instead of, “The child stared in a blank daze,” I chose to write something like, “The child gazed at a point of interest known only to him.” Your solutions don’t need to be so wordy, but you get the idea. The concept goes along with other common red flag tropes all writers must be aware of. Like the one where, as a male writer, I am officially forbidden from describing female body parts in sensual detail for no earthly reason. And another where, as a white author, a mental alarm goes off if I try to use a shopping list of food items to describe the skin tones of people of color. Sure, it would be easier if there was a magical way to respectably pull those two off, but I have yet to figure one out. In all of these cases, the red flags don’t exist to restrict you as a writer. They exist to free you from the mistake of distracting the reader out of the entrancing narrative you are working so hard to construct–especially the readers who share the traits you are giving to your characters. 

In the end, every time you write something that goes beyond your personal experience, you are taking a risk. But in our world of omniscient internet, the risk of getting your facts wrong is less than the risk of undervaluing the experiences of others. I knew I could never convey the entire experience of every child with Infantile Spasms and cognitive delay, or that of their families. But I knew I had to at least do right by them with the choices I made. Hopefully, that same care for the people who inspire your characters will guide your writing as well. 

About the Author

After graduating from film school, Matthew Wilcox worked in advertising as a copywriter penning everything from pickle coupons to national TV commercials. He eventually took a break from full-time work to focus on raising his kids and helping his son in his fight against epilepsy. In addition to writing ads, Matthew also studied comedy at a number of Chicago’s writing and satire programs. Some of his other completed works include online satire, several sketch revues, and a one-act play. He lives with his family in Chicago, Illinois.

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Hello all, and welcome to this week’s article for FanFiAddict’s series on Neurodivergence in Fiction. I cannot understate how appreciative I am for the overwhelming amount of support and enthusiasm I have seen for this series of mine; thank you! For the next several months we will be bringing you a guest post every Wednesday from a neurodivergent author. This will hopefully highlight some of the challenges that come with writing for a largely neurotypical audience, while also giving valuable insight to the craft itself and providing a window into the neurodivergent experience — at least through the lens of fiction.

(Note: I have opened up the series to non-authors and those with other mental health issues.)

This week, we are joined by our first blogger, Jodie from Witty and Sarcastic Bookclub blog!

As always, if you need to catch up on any articles, check out the landing page for the series here.

And, without further ado, here’s the article.

Well, this is a new experience for me. I’ve been reading and appreciating this series on Neurodivergence. Neurodivergence is one of those words that I always wonder about. Do I fit? As someone with Bipolar Type One (what I’ve heard people refer to as “the worst kind”, which is about ten types of incorrect), I see things differently than your typical “normal person”.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder about twenty years ago now.  The crib notes explanation of bipolar is this: imagine a line. This is where your “normal range” for emotions would be. The baseline, if you will. There may be dips and rises- a promotion might cause a slight upward spike, and bad news would cause a downward one. With bipolar, it becomes much more extreme. There are huge highs, and devastating lows. They aren’t the result of anything, they just are. I could get into the nitty gritty of it and talk about how good mania feels right before it slips into terrifying, or how hard it is to keep going when the depression hits, but it’s one of those things that is difficult to explain properly. It does, however, change how I function.

I am dependent on medication. I take a lovely little pill to keep my mood “stabilized”. Of course, my baseline is naturally lower, so that runs the risk of depression hitting hard. Thus the need for another pill, this one to help soften the blow. I loathe medication, but I also appreciate it. I don’t really think anyone likes needing medication to function. And there’s always that risk that I’ll slip into the beginning of mania and decide to stop taking it. Mania feels great when it starts. The colors are sharper, I don’t need to sleep, I’m much more charismatic (or at least I’m outgoing), and I have a confidence that is not a normal part of my personality. I have to remind myself of what can come next if I stop taking my medication. That dizzying mania that’s dangerous and terrifying. It exists after the pleasant buzz of early mania (hypomania) and comes right before the plummet into severe depression.

Do you want to know what helps? Books. Back when I didn’t have a name for this, when I only knew that I sometimes was at war with myself, books offered a way to cope. They took me to different places and let me think about problems that were solved, defeated, overcome. After learning the name for what I had been dealing with my entire life, I started noticing that every now and again I’d find a character that seemed to struggle with the same things. Sturm in the Dragonlance Chronicles felt like he was slogging through his own darkness. Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower had extreme highs and lows. Actually, I have a quote from this book tattooed on my shoulder, it describes bipolar so well: “So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad, and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be”. The first time I read An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, I was floored. This autobiography felt so familiar to how I am. I remember being absolutely stunned by the knowledge that someone else truly understood. Books like that are so important.

Now, please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. I don’t feel sorry for myself at all, and I really don’t want pity. I’ve only recently started being open about my bipolar after finally realizing that it’s not a secret shame. I didn’t ask for it, and I certainly don’t love it (although I do wonder sometimes who I would even be without depression looking over my shoulder), but I didn’t do anything wrong. I just deal with things a little differently. I have safeguards in place to make sure I don’t spend money I don’t have if I suddenly become manic. I take my medication. I have people around me who know me well enough to notice when I’m having a harder time. The reason I am being more open about it is certainly not for pity or attention. It’s because it would have meant the world to me when I was younger that I wasn’t the only one going through the nightmare of diagnosis and treatment. Having people who really understand is huge. I don’t see too many books where neurodivergence is really expressed correctly, although they are popping up more and more often. I can always tell when an author has firsthand knowledge versus when they are trying to accurately represent something they might not fully understand, and I respect the bravery it takes to bare a part of yourself in writing. One of the many great things about books is their ability to show us what life looks like for someone else. A person might not experience depression (something I would never wish on anyone), but they can see how it looks to someone else. Maybe the idea of mania is foreign to someone, but they can read about how it feels. ASD, for example, is something that I have not experienced, but articles such as the ones in this series can give me a little more knowledge. I say this on a pretty regular basis, but that doesn’t make it any less true: words have power. They can entertain, they can teach. They can remind us that we aren’t alone, that someone understands. I think that’s something special.

About the Author

Jodie Crump is the creator of the Witty and Sarcastic Bookclub blog. She either lives in Florida with her husband and sons, or in a fantasy book-she’ll never tell which. When she’s not reading, Jodie balances her time between homeschooling her hooligans, playing Dungeons and Dragons, and lamenting her inability to pronounce “lozenge”.

Find her online at www.wittyandsarcasticbookclub.home.blog or https://www.twitter.com/WS_BOOKCLUB.

Hello all, and welcome to this week’s article for FanFiAddict’s series on Neurodivergence in Fiction. I cannot understate how appreciative I am for the overwhelming amount of support and enthusiasm I have seen for this series of mine; thank you! For the next several months we will be bringing you a guest post every Wednesday from a neurodivergent author. This will hopefully highlight some of the challenges that come with writing for a largely neurotypical audience, while also giving valuable insight to the craft itself and providing a window into the neurodivergent experience — at least through the lens of fiction.

This week, I am going to share an essay that I have been working on over the past weeks. This is the most intensely personal and difficult thing that I have had to write and I have been struggling on whether I should release it or not (hello, anxiety.) But, here she is. I hope you find something of value in this little piece of me that I offer.

As always, if you need to catch up on any articles, check out the landing page for the series here.

And, without further ado, here’s the article.

I have been writing essays such as this one in my head for as long as I can remember, I just didn’t recognize it for what it was. I was only very recently formally diagnosed with Autism and the weeks leading up it saw me hammered with some of the worst anxiety I’ve ever had. To give you a little background, during one of my monthly appointments, my primary psychiatrist mentioned that I may be autistic and referred me to the only Autism clinic servicing my area. At the intake appointment for the clinic, I was told that there was a one year long waiting list to be evaluated. That was fine, I understood. Then COVID happened and the waiting list was suddenly much longer. All told, it took just over two years to get a formal diagnosis after my psychiatrist informed me of her suspicions.

I never really thought I had autism. Autistic people can’t function, right? They’re all tantrums and yelling. I am quiet and reserved. I’m not a genius, I just like to read. The propagation of these stereotypes in society is so pervasive that I couldn’t even recognize something so critical about myself. Sometimes it’s hard for me to accept that I have autism simply because I am afraid to confront the fact that autism almost always means lesser. Even a cursory glance at autistic characters in media will yield a plethora of individuals that look nothing like me but are the face of autism to the world. Forrest Gump, Sheldon Cooper, the list goes on and on, and none of them are characters that make you want to be them. There’s hardly a politically correct term used to describe Forrest Gump in the movie and all anyone thinks of Sheldon is that he’s an asshole. Popular culture informs the masses how we should think about certain topics. The age-old response after telling someone you’re autistic is, “Oh, so you’re like Rain Man!” While Rain Man is, perhaps, a factual representation of autism, you now have people basing their view of the entire autism spectrum from this one character who has as an extremely rare condition. When we cry for representation, we cry for good representation. Spectrum is, perhaps, the word most associated with Autism, and for good reason. We’re not all the same, yet here we are so often boiled down to the genius or the fool.

When my psychiatrist told me two years ago that she thought I might be autistic, I started researching it and based on my findings I assumed that I was as well. Something that, looking back, seems so obvious. From Googling “Autism Spectrum Disorder” to taking the Autism Spectrum Quotient Test (I scored a 43/50. Go me.) everything was slowly falling into place. Trouble creating and maintaining relationships? Check. Misunderstanding social cues? Check. All-absorbing interest in specific topics? Check. In hindsight, the signs were all there, but still there was this image of autism that had been painted for me and it looked altogether different than what I saw in the mirror.

So, in the weeks leading up to my diagnosis, I had two thoughts going through my head. The first was, “Oh, shit. What if I am not autistic?” I have put a lot of hard work into the Neurodivergence in Fiction series, and it was something that I was happy to do as I was building an identity as an autistic person. I had this overpowering fear that all of a sudden, I would be a fraud—that I would be taking space from a truly autistic person and that my voice shouldn’t be added to a discussion that I didn’t belong in.

The second thought I had was, “What if I am autistic?” This is the most troubling to me and it’s something that has stuck with me over the past few weeks and has really been begging for me to speak about. It wasn’t until very recently that I had ever a.) read a good portrayal of an autistic character and b.) deeply connected with a character. All the examples that I can think of portray autistic characters the same way, you’re either a savant or you’re a burden. And I’m no savant, folx.

I have been reading SFF for 25+ years now and it breaks my heart that I have only recently found myself so clearly echoed in fiction. When the narrative told by pop culture is that neurodivergent people add no value to society then how am I supposed to reckon with my diagnosis? I already know that I add little value, economically speaking. I struggle to hold down jobs because I am in turns bored by the tedium or overwhelmed by social interaction. I am uneducated, having dropped out of high school because I couldn’t stand to go the extra semester it would have taken to graduate. It’s hard for me to have hopes and dreams because I have no prospects. There’s nowhere for me to fit in in a world that bases a person’s worth on their ability to contribute to the economy.

Historically, I have turned to video games and reading for comfort. Both have been a means of escapism throughout my life and I know with absolute certainty that I would not have made it this far if it weren’t for both of these things. When I was younger, I would escape to the woods behind my house and read until I couldn’t see the pages anymore, nestle down into a bed of pine needles, and sleep until morning; or, I’d walk a few miles to a friend’s house and hunker down to play video games for a weekend. My pre-teen/teen years were full of terror and freedom and both things have left an indelible mark on me. In school, I was the weird kid toting around 700-page tomes with muscle-bound dudes and scantily clad women on the covers, sitting alone at lunch and reading in between bites. My role models were the heroes I found in the pages and my sense of right and wrong was heavily influenced by the stories I read. Social situations have always been difficult for me, so I learned how to react and respond to certain social cues from books and video games. Social situations are tricky and unpredictable, but here are these clearly defined rules for how you should respond to a nearly infinite number of scenarios. Even still, I was emulating what I thought I should be, creating role models out of the heroes I read about or played on screen. I still hadn’t found a hero that looked like me.

There are plenty of characters in fiction that are coded as Autistic, meaning they display traits commonly associated with autism but are not formally given that diagnosis by the creator. There are, of course, Spock and the rest of the Vulcans from Star Trek and, more recently, Murderbot from Martha Wells’ wonderful series The Murderbot Diaries. While plenty of autistic people, myself included, have come to relate to these and other coded characters, they are still portrayed as alien or other. Coding has its place, and I can’t argue that there won’t always be reasons that a creator may not want to explicitly write a character as Autistic, or any other marginalized group for that matter. However, the fact that we are spoken of in hushed tones, with sideways glances, doesn’t have to be reflected so clearly in media. Coding can truly be stifling, a double-edged sword of “Eat your scraps and be satisfied,” where we’re given what is offered and told to be grateful for the honor. But, in a time where Autistic people are literally undergoing government-sanctioned torture by electric shock, what we don’t need is to be reminded of our otherness. Where are the autistic heroes? Where is the character that I can look up to not to wish I could be normal like them, but the one that makes me love being me? How am I supposed to have the courage to live my truth unafraid when creators worry that their characters will be hated for being like me?

It wasn’t until two of my most recent reads that I was able to do this, that I found myself in the pages of a book. Since first joining Book Twitter and FanFiAddict earlier this year, I have had my first interactions with other autistic people and in doing so I have learned a ton about myself. My good friend and co-blogger here at FFA, C.M. Caplan, released his debut novel, The Sword in the Street, earlier this year and it absolutely blew me away. The honesty with which he wrote the character Edwin is magical. Edwin, like Caplan himself, is Autistic and the portrayal of his autism was so brazenly honest that I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between myself and Edwin. Edwin loves his boyfriend deeply, but he doesn’t always pick up on the little social cues that John gives, which leads to a lot of tension between the two. It is masterfully written and reminds me of my own difficulties with forming and maintaining relationships.

Shortly after reading The Sword in the Street, I finally got around to reading the much-lauded Dragon Mage by ML Spencer, another autistic author who wrote a main character that I could fully relate to. In Dragon Mage the main character, Aram, is bullied for being different. He is obsessed with knots and spends his days dreaming of becoming a sailor and learning every knot in the world. Aram is unabashedly himself and still gets to be the hero. He stims and misunderstands social cues, and even so, because of his unique way of viewing the world, he has the power to save it.

I don’t think I ever realized that I was missing out on autistic representation in SFF. The characters in those stories are heroes, they’re above and beyond what someone like me could ever hope to become, right? Maybe so. But, in the cases of Edwin and Aram, I found a little piece of myself staring back at me from the pages of the books they inhabit. Instead of being shown as the pinnacle of humanity, something we should all aspire to, they are raw and honest portrayals of autism. They reflected the hero that is already in me and that’s why representation matters. Not as some arbitrary box you can check to say that your story is diverse, but so that those that look like you or me can imagine they too are special for being just who they are.

About the Author

Justin Gross is a lover of all things SFF and has been an avid reader since he was three. He is attempting to build the world’s largest private library (not really, but ask his wife and she might agree). Justin is always excited to gush over his favorite reads, which more often than not are also his latest reads. His likes trend toward sweeping epics, with complex characters and even more complex plots. Until recently he was totally against romance, but certain books have shown him that it can be done well. He currently has a love/hate relationship with grimdark.

Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads! All of his blogging stuff can be found here on FanFiAddict!