I haven’t done one of these in quite a while, and I know some of what I will write below has been said in asks off and on, but this would be a very good time to address it. Most likely, the number one question I get from readers is about City of Bears–or more precisely, when City of Bears is coming back. It turns out I finally have a short answer for all of you! The answer is tomorrow!
Just in time for Christmas, right?
I have a long answer too, however, and it has a lot of important caveats to it, before you all get carried away. Really, I just want to soften the blow a bit–if you were looking for a continuation of the story I was telling before, from “Big Bears on Campus” through “Rising Powers”, I’m sorry to say that this isn’t what you will be getting, and I want to take a moment to talk about why, and why “City of Bears” means so much to me, and why it has taken me so long to get back to it–after all, it’s been five years now since that November where I hammered out 60,000 words as quickly as I could, but when I stopped and looked at what I was doing, and where the story seemed to be heading, I couldn’t help but feel a creeping dissatisfaction, and one I couldn’t quite explain, even to myself. So I sat on it, planned on continuing it later, and then eventually shelved it along with many other unfinished stories of mine. I knew that there was more to tell, and more to write, but what I had written then wasn’t what I needed it to be.
There were a few false restarts along the way. I tried on occasion to pick up where I’d left off, but I’d lost the thread of the story–or rather, the way I had initially planned the story developing was no longer the direction that I wanted to see it go. Tristan’s magical hold on the world was always intended to be temporary, in one sense or another. I never really could imagine a scenario, when I started plotting things out, where he won–it just didn’t seem to make sense any other way. It didn’t necessarily mean that the world was put back the way it had been, but the entire notion seemed too outlandish to really be sustainable. As I’ve written before, in various replies to asks on the topic, the question of what a queer future looks like is one which is very difficult to try and answer, especially within a hetero framework, because the future, for heteroculture, is always defined within generations of progeny–but as queers, that framework crumbles to bits very quickly, for obvious reasons.
My original plotting tried to address this conundrum in a few different ways, but none of them really felt satisfying or thought through. It seemed to me that City of Bears might actually be a dystopia of sorts, a society predicated on its own end, or one which required a parasitic relationship with a society outside of itself in order to bring in new bodies to sustain it. I tried various ways of conceiving it as a world that I might want to use, but none of them felt authentic–in part because I didn’t want to try and explain how something like the City of Bears could exist. But an origin story is, by necessity, the creation of a world. By rooting the narrative in our own world, I had necessitated, in some ways, the need to explain how it could function as one.
So I sat on it. I considered the possibility that it might just be a dead story, and that I’d never continue it. I considered the possibility that I was overthinking everything a bit too much, as an excuse to foster writer’s block. But I kept writing other stories, and as I did, a few other building blocks fell into place. I managed to separate out and distinguish between setting and world, and decided, firmly, that I much preferred to use the former. Pigtown, as I’ve written before, is a setting. The same with Louisiana Acres. These settings recur, but they are never the same. Pigtown isn’t one bar, in one city–it exists anywhere, potentially. It can be anywhere, and confront anyone–as a dive bar in the country, as a seedy sex club, as your friendly neighborhood pub with a suspicious curtain in the back, as a corruptive neighborhood spreading through the city. Pigtown is all of those things and none of them, because it is just the set piece to the actual story itself. It took me a while, but I realized, at last, that City of Bears didn’t need to be some world I had to build. It too, could be a setting of sorts–and when I had that realization, I felt like I was awash in possibility.
Still, it took me a while to work up the nerve to actually sit down and write something using it, in part because I wasn’t quite sure how to translate all of my ideas from before into a different framework, but a few important qualities stood out to me. City of Bears is, fundamentally, about identity and change–especially in the later entries. What would it be like to exist in a place where, from day to day, you might not even be the same person, with the same memories and desires, as you were the day before? If identity was rendered so fragile, then what would it even be like to exist as an agent in those sorts of circumstances, where a puff of the wrong cigar, or wrong turn around a corner could send you spiralling into some entirely new life? Those were the stories I found exciting. But beyond that, City of Bears has always been, to me, about imagining the possibilities, and the hope, of a queer community utterly divorced from the cishet social structure we all find ourselves in. It wouldn’t be a utopia by any means, but it would be radically different–and that is something I have always longed to see.
And so, last week, the kernel of a story came to me, and I wrote it, and here it is. I’m really fond of it–it feels new to me in a way a lot of my writing doesn’t. It might be a bit confusing, and for that I apologize–I’m not a fan of explaining the rules of a world in story–I’d rather just show them in action, and this story is as much about introducing the mechanics of the setting, to you, the readers, and as a way for me to test out some ideas. In any case, this is just a short story, meant to be self-contained, and next year I hope to write more using the setting. There are some characters and conflicts and stories from the first run of the series that I definitely want to revisit–but what those stories might look like I don’t know, as of yet. Like everything else, I’ll figure it out as I go along.
In any case, thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed all the stories this year, and thanks again to everyone who supported me on Patreon–especially through the tumult of the last month. As I wrote earlier, given that Patreon isn’t rolling out the fee changes after all, I won’t be changing the cost of any of my reward tiers–that said, as of right now, I’m just about $20 shy of the seven hundred dollar mark, which would mean content seven days a week for all of you! If that’s something you’d like to see, and you don’t already support me, you can find more details here.
Bracken's Corner 