Okay. Hi. There's no cute way to ease into this one, so I'm just going to address the elephant in the room: Forging the Phis has been on hiatus for over a month now. I don't have a firm date for when the next chapter is coming. And I feel like I owe you, my dear readers, an actual explanation instead of just going quiet, which — full disclosure — is exactly what I always swore I'd never do to a story mid-run. So here we are. Let's talk about it.
Long story short: I'm transitioning. I've known I'm trans for as long as I can remember, but I just kept finding reasons not to act on it. Those days are over. I started hormones a month ago today, actually, which feels like a strange kind of anniversary to be marking with a blog post, but here we are. I’m doing my own estradiol injections, I found a great therapist, I've started voice coaching. The whole list. It's real, it's happening, and it's the actual reason the chapters stopped. How am I feeling about everything? Well, funny you should ask...
And while we’re addressing elephants in the room: yes, this is connected to my Pride Month comic. I know it read like a retrospective. The "Day 1" to "Finally, Me" structure, the trans flag pin, the mirror bookending the mirror. That was deliberate, and I let people draw their own conclusions about it, because at the time I wasn't ready to say out loud that I was actually considering this for myself. Making that comic was genuinely part of how I got here, it was a way of letting myself imagine it before I could admit I was imagining it. But it was speculative when I made it, not a record of something already underway. I wasn't lying to you, exactly. I just wasn't ready to tell the whole truth yet. There's probably a difference between those two things, and there's probably not, and I've been thinking about that a lot this month, so you're getting the benefit of it now.
Enough about me, let’s talk about the writing. Or lack thereof. It’s not just because I’ve been busy doing transition-related stuff, though that has eaten up a solid chunk of my brainwaves. It’s also that, even when I do have the time, the TG fiction genre doesn’t pull at me the same way it used to. The thing that used to light up in my brain when I opened up Fictionmania, or when I saw that Joe Sixpack had published a new book, or when I sat down to write the Phis? It’s gone quiet.
I don't think it's quite as simple as "the kink was a fantasy that I've outgrown." I think the fiction was meeting a real need I couldn't meet directly yet, and now that I can, I don't need it to do that job anymore. That's not a knock on the genre, or on anyone still finding what they need through it. It's just where I've landed. If you want the fuller version of that idea, here's an essay that helped me a lot in thinking this through (heads up that it's direct about sex and kink in a way this post isn't).
“Okay, thanks Paige. That’s great and all, appreciate the psychology lesson. But what happens to the Phis?”
Great question! I'm not abandoning our girls in the woods. I want to be clear about that, because I know unexplained hiatuses in this genre have a bad habit of turning into permanent ones, and I'm not interested in being one more author who vanishes mid-arc and leaves everyone holding an unfinished story. But I also can't promise you it's coming back exactly the way it would have a few months ago. I was already in the middle of reworking chapters 15 and 16 before any of this happened — the story was shifting under me anyway — and I think it's honest to say that what I'm going through now is probably going to shift it further. I don't know yet what that looks like. I'm asking you to be patient with me while I find out, because I'd rather take the time to get it right than force out chapters that aren't actually where the story wants to go.
That's it. That's the whole thing. Thank you for sticking around this long, and for the ones of you who are going to see a piece of your own story in this: Hi. I see you too.
xoxo, Paige