Reading

Entry tags:

work

Web Ban Circumvention: Go Free

Rogan: In my post about a physical newsletter, I forgot another thing we’ve been considering doing to circumvent the bans: make our digital work free and run it on donations like LiberaPay.

( Read more... )

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Graves, Flowers, and Traumatic Growth

Rogan: Well, this is something I have been keeping a secret for the past year, but it looks like I might have finally finished my personal memory work. Since September 2024, I have had only a few episodes, all triggered under extremely specific, unusual circumstances and all fairly easy to deal with. As I've waited to see if I'm truly done, I've come to find a lot of discussions about trauma lacking. As one therapist of mine once called it, there's a lot of talk of traumatic injury, and barely any about traumatic growth.

( Looking back from where I am. )

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work

Scribbles and Bits: the Newsletter?

As many of you know, within the past three months, we've been dealing with a lot of crackdowns on our work online. Our blog is unviewable in Mississippi and our #1 bestseller, All in the Family, got kicked off itch.io. This has nothing to do with the works themselves (oh no, a minor might read our very adult essay about TAXES and BUSINESS EXPENSES!) but wealthy, powerful people trying to control others.

As annoyed as we are by this, we are not surprised. We've seen this coming for years, we have a plan, and we want to hear how YOU feel about it, fans and readers!

( We're gonna arty like it's 1999! )

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Here's to Us, by the Arachnixe Entity (short fiction, 2022)

“What are your pronouns?” I ask, after they introduce themselves, trying to be polite.

“We/us/our,” is the response.

Blurb: A drunken date, a sloppy makeout, a merging into a happy greater hivemind.

Why is it worth your time?: A fun realitybending story of mind joining. It's short, online, and free!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, creator speaks from experience, identity blending, romantic relationships

Content Warnings: identity loss and alcohol

Access Notes: free, online, screenreadable

Misc Notes: Read it here! Back-up link here.

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Out in the Night, by the Arachnixe Entity (short fiction, 2021)

We dream of us. Complete and secure within ourself, requiring nothing, but desiring everything.

Blurb: A dream of merging into a greater hivemind.

Why is it worth your time?: It's short, beautiful, and surreal. Plus it's free!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, dreamfolk, creator speaks from experience, identityblending, intimate relationships

Content Warnings: loss of identity

Access Notes: free to read, screenreadable, online

Misc Notes: Read online here! Back-up link here.

In the Company of Mind, by Steven Piziks (sci-fi novel, 1998)

Though I don't think I'll be telling our clients about it any time soon, Lance mused. Somehow I don't think they'd be interested in hiring a man with forty-odd alters and a nanobot hive living inside him.

Blurb: The Company, a cyborg security specialist with MPD and a sentient nanobot hive, has escaped their abusive father and built a productive, if not necessarily happy life for themselves. But when your father is richer than God, sometimes it's not easy to escape the past...

Why is it worth your time?: This one was solidly entertaining! The author alternates chapters between the Company's present as an adult and their past as a child. Each time period merges to climax at the same time, both dealing with their abusive father, who is a kind of terrifying that is hard to write well, but we found the depiction credible and scary. (What if YOUR abuser was as rich as Elon Musk and as spiteful and powerful as Donald Trump?) The climax was especially satisfying. This is very much a '90s MPD book, and the Company is definitely a type we have seen many times before, but there are worse things than to do that well! If you want a cyborg multi revenge fantasy, give it a try!

Plural Tags: abuse high focus (mind the content warnings!), closeting, cofronting, fusion/integration, identityblending, children, nonhumans (AI), family, enmity, and teamwork relationships, medical (MPD) type, switching, voices

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Available on paperback and audiobook... and also in Italian, under the name La compagnia della mente! Someone has also bootlegged a digital copy on archive.org, the closest to an ebook you can get.

Misc Notes: Has a sequel, but this book stands alone totally fine.

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Vax LB Reads Books

Getting double vaxxed means we spent yesterday on our ass, reading all our backed up library books. So, what’d we read? (Combining with other books we finished a week or so ago.)

( queers and multis and cat people, oh my! )

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The Power of Touch, by Phyllis K. Davis

Miranda: I was hoping to make a proper post about all this, but I am freshly vaccinated and rapidly losing my ability to think. So instead I will just post the notes because this interlibrary loan book must be returned to Utah and we need these notes somewhere for later.

Around the time of those touch workshops, Rogan took an interest in trying to study touch more. The two books we've read on the subject are Touch by Tiffany Fields, and now the Power of Touch, by Phyllis K. Davis.

If you only get to read one, choose Fields; her book is definitely stronger, dealing in study data on the therapeutic uses of touch for various ailments and situations. However, Davis does engage with something Fields doesn't: "vicarious touch" and "internal touch"... things that are extremely relevant to us multi-wise, as people who overwhelmingly meet our touch needs through noncorporeal means.

( Read more... )

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poll

2025 October Fan Poll

Hey everybody, it's that time again: time to vote for which stuff gets the LiberaPay/Patreon money this month!

As always, anyone can vote (please do!), but LiberaPay and Patreon patrons get double weight for their votes. (Due to Patreon's porn purges, I really encourage you to use LiberaPay, if you get a choice.) If you want to see the blurbs for any of these works, those are here! (You can also leave your requests there; requesting a story or essay is always free!) If you don't have a DW and so can't do the poll, that's okay; just leave your vote in the comments below; anon comments are turned on.

Which works gets the money, and thus posted this month? YOU CHOOSE, readers!

Poll #33684 2025 October Fan Poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 27

View Respondents

Did you toss LiberaPay/Patreon money my way last month?

View Answers

Yes (my votes count double)
8 (100.0%)

What writing gets posted this month?

View Answers

Infinity Smashed: Born Lucky
6 (22.2%)

Reverend Alpert: the Traveling Exorcist
2 (7.4%)

Henchwench for Hire (F/F supervillainy)
4 (14.8%)

Rutless (trans omegaverse porno)
2 (7.4%)

Many-Selved Family Portraiture
9 (33.3%)

Anatomy of a Dance (essay)
8 (29.6%)

The Boy Whose Heart Is Home (teen hardship)
3 (11.1%)

The Battleaxe and the Blood-Eater (pseudo Greco-Roman gladiators)
3 (11.1%)

two apocalyptic micro-stories
4 (14.8%)

Rage Against the Regime (LB life)
9 (33.3%)

What art/comic/zine gets posted this month?

View Answers

Cult Comix
6 (23.1%)

Death Watch
4 (15.4%)

How it Was, How It Is
4 (15.4%)

2012 hospital sketchbook
1 (3.8%)

2013 Homeless Year sketchbook
0 (0.0%)

2014 AllFam sketchbook
2 (7.7%)

Protection
1 (3.8%)

2015 early Biff sketchbook
3 (11.5%)

So Wiggly, So Fluffy Sweethearts (silly Rawlin sketch comics)
15 (57.7%)

Old Man Yaoi (silly LB sketch comic)
14 (53.8%)

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lb makes:comics

Zine/Comic: the Fall of Rawlin

We have uploaded a chapter of Madgic entitled "the Fall of Rawlin" after discovering to our horror that the first print run of the omnibus had a printer error (entirely our fault) which made a very important part of the comic completely unreadable. It's now up (and fully alt-texted) on healthymultiplicity.com!

We are so sorry about this. The ebook has been updated with corrections, and the second print run also has it corrected, but if you bought the first run of the omnibus and wondered what the hell was wrong with page 146 or so, here's your answer.

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Comic: Seductive Beast, 2024

Just a one-pager, which means we're popping it up straight here! These are what all our pencils look like before inking; eventually all these Mori and Rawlin comics are going to end up in a book called (for now) Xenogals in Love.

Beneath the image is only the textual transcript, no commentary. Rawlin was going by male terms at the time, thus why Mori asked Biff first.

( A very stupid comic behind the cut where everyone 'helps' Rawlin. )

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Essay: LB Economics

LB Economics
Series: Essay
Summary: How the sausage gets made. I hope y’all like color-coded numerical tables!
Word Count: 3634
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month. Also, since it’s not covered in the essay itself, if you’re a generous sort and wondering, “LB, what’s the best way to give you money?” the answer is: LiberaPay or a recurring check through the mail (yes, people do this), followed by Patreon, followed by buying an Ebook Megapack. Regarding buying individual books… paper books require more printing and shipping, but ebooks deal with more robo-bans and crackdowns, so we consider them about equal on our end.

Money is considered one of the forbidden public subjects, along with sex and religion. It’s one thing to say what you do, another to admit how much you make at it. However, we’re one of the only people doing what we do, and we want people to know the financial aspects of our job, so as to puncture some rosy illusions and defuse envy. So let’s talk about money.

( No one really knows how the game is played / the art of the trade / How the sausage gets made / We just assume that it happens! )

Current Mood: good

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Snowflakes and Raindrops

Mori: that weeklong headache, the worst part of it was, it tended to hit (or get worse) at night. Nothing worked, not ibuprofen, not ice packs, nothing. It was the PITS.

( My girlfriend took pity on me and helped fix it with touch! )

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Call for obituaries for dead, dormant, and integrated headmates (& similar beings)

(Note: Submissions may be open indefinitely, but anyone who wants to be included in the first printing should submit by October 25 2025. This post is also available as a Google Doc.)

I’m Riley of a Body et al., a plural collective best known for our online work on plural education and our original zines. I’m working on a project compiling obituaries for members of plural collectives or adjacent beings (alters, soulbonds, dæmons, imaginary friends, etc.) who are dead, dormant, integrated, or otherwise gone for the foreseeable future and mourned.

This is an intentionally broad prompt; the only requirements are that obituaries be for someone gone in a way comparable to death (whatever that means to you&), and that they must be individual entities without their own bodies (a system’s collective body dying would not be included).
Disenfranchised grief is a near universal experience among plurals who have lost headmates. Being denied the right to acknowledge losses as death (or comparable to it) or to publicly mourn is a deeply damaging experience. I would like to make a public record of our grief, and in a format historically restricted to the physical deaths of people with their own bodies; obituaries and elegies.

Submission information:

Obituaries for the first printing must be submitted by October 25th 2025; there is no guarantee that a second edition will be made, though I hope to make one.
Submissions should be in the form of an obituary with an optional image of the subject included, ideally around 200 words (40 at least, 250 at most). For examples, you can see this obituary-writing guide aimed at singlet deaths, and this example obituary for a headmate. You do not need to adhere strictly to the format.
Obituaries should be for your own headmates/alters/etc.—obituaries for headmates in other peoples’ systems should be written with their consent, with contact information provided so we can verify. Very limited exceptions may be made if anonymized.
By submitting, you are agreeing to the contents of your submission being used in a commercial project without compensation or retraction, and confirming that all submitted materials are your own and made without the use of generative AI. (In less legalistic terms, this collection will be for sale, everything you submit—text, art, photos—needs to be your own original creation, and you can’t take back submissions after printing.)
Email submissions to headmateobituaries at gmail dot com—you can submit as many obituaries as you like, but please try to send them in the same message!
Questions can be sent via email, PMs, or private communication if you have my contact information.

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Gayle Rubin on Categories

“Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant ‘existing things’ does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like ‘woman,’ ‘butch,’ ‘lesbian,’ or ‘transsexual’ are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism.” —Gayle Rubin, “Of catamites and kings: Reflections on butch, gender, and boundaries,” The Persistent Desire: a Femme-Butch Reader, Boston: Alyson Publications, 1992, pg. 477-478

Rubin was talking about lesbian political fights about trans people and the overlap and boundaries between butch and transsexuality (and there’s LOTS of expressions of what we’d nowadays call trans and gender dysphoria in A Persistent Desire), but I think the same ideas apply to multi/plural/many-selved stuff too. Goodness knows I spent enough time chewing on my arm because I couldn’t figure out how to express a concept without it turning into a hopeless argument over the terms in use. This whole essay has a lot of great quotes (“sexual preference, gender roles, and political stance cannot be equated, and do not directly determine or reflect one another”) and is worth reading.

Also it’s just really nice to see an essay over thirty years old saying “cool your jets about trans people, it’s fine. Your politics will survive.”

Mori wants this book like burning. Too bad used paperbacks start at $100.