Sunspot

Hey, folks!

Let’s talk about where Sunspot comes from. This isn’t so much a peek behind the curtain of the week-by-week writing process as it is a discussion of the biggest inspirations for the story and why it is how it is. There are…let’s say four key works that Sunspot owes most of its DNA to.

The setting has been in my head for…a decade and change, by now. Like all stories not put to paper, it’s mutated quite a lot over the years as I encountered other stories to crib ideas from, and few major elements have survived all that time. The Spire, the Vaetna (a word whose origin I think comes from a random one-off spell in Eragon, but I’m unsure), Ezzen’s name, the Frozen Flame (no, I’ve never played Chrono Trigger), the motif of spears, and…that’s really it. But I never actually wrote any of the story down—barely even talked about it to anybody; it was my dumb little pet story idea that I wasn’t confident enough to ever do anything with. I didn’t write or do anything else creative as a hobby until the pandemic, when I decided to learn to draw, but I never reached a point with it where I felt like I could bring the Vaetna to life in a webcomic or similar. So the ideas just kept fermenting.

Enter The Wandering Inn, the first of those four stories (not chronologically, but bear with me). For the unfamiliar, TWI is an isekai LitRPG—a pair of words I normally have a fairly high degree of distaste for—which transcends the connotations of both of those labels. It’s also the longest contiguous work of fiction in the English language, sitting at about thirteen million words and growing by about a million and a half more each year.

I won’t bore you with every reason I adore TWI. I’ve gone over most of those points in an open letter I wrote to pirateaba in March, which you can read here. Paba actually responded to this less than an hour later with an equally long reply, which left me sobbing uncontrollably for half an hour because I had never felt so seen before. It’s kind of silly, but that was the moment where I started to incorporate “being a storyteller” into my identity.

And TWI did indeed get me writing. I could not stop writing fanfic for The Wandering Inn, from short snippets to longer oneshots to novella-length stories. A lot of it is porn—but porn with plot, porn which still tries to live up to the thematic beats essential to the story and to do justice to the characters. I waffled a bit on how much smut I wanted to include in Sunspot, but I think what bits we’ve done so far have been harmonious with and strengthen the rest of the story.

According to my AO3, I’ve written just shy of 100k words of TWI fic—meaning Sunspot’s already longer than all of it. But it was how I cut my teeth with writing and learned that I was actually pretty dang good at it, at least with TWI’s unrivaled quantity of canon that meant I could skip things like establishing character dynamics or magic systems. But those things scared me, so I still didn’t attempt to write anything original.

This brings me to the second of those four stories: Katalepsis. It’s…hard to describe. I’d call it cosmic horror yuri, as in yuri where the participating members are cosmic horrors. It’s probably one of the best works of fiction I’ve ever read, period. From the line-by-line prose to the character work to the texture of the setting, it’s all gorgeous. Sunspot owes much of its style to Kata: the first-person narration, the emphasis on food, the trans(both gender & human) theming, the belief that connection with other people is a force more powerful than any dark god. Actually, it shares that last one with TWI, too.

I haven’t written much fanfic for Katalepsis; in fact, at time of writing I’m not even caught up (arc 14, I believe). But I’ve easily passed ten thousand words rambling about it in its Discord server, and talking about fiction more broadly with all the wonderful artists and writers there helped crystallize a lot of the ideas that would eventually become Sunspot. Basically all of Sunspot’s characters—the Radiances and Ez—can be fairly accurately described as a hodgepodge of different Katalepsis characters. Have fun guessing who’s made of who! Also, a lot of the smuttier elements and the general impact of attraction on Ez’s psyche are heavily inspired by Katalepsis.

That being said, I still didn’t actually start putting Sunspot to paper in any serious dimension until six months ago, when I was diagnosed with cancer. Fear not; we nuked it from orbit, and I’m totally healthy these days—but the five days I spent in the hospital gave me a lot of time to think about the future, and the potential lack thereof. This was only a few weeks after that letter to pirateaba, in which I had discussed their own memento mori and the death of Akira Toriyama. So in that hospital bed, I started to work on Sunspot in earnest.

Cancer killed science fiction author Iain M. Banks, who wrote the Culture novels, the third work on this list. It’s more of an anthology of different stories about a hyper-advanced mega-civilization—the titular Culture—interfering in the affairs of other species, often to adverse effect. I read those books about two years prior to my own diagnosis, listening to the audiobooks while I worked at a knife sharpening plant in hundred degree heat. Much of the Spire’s foreign policy, and therefore the texture of Sunspot’s whole setting, is inspired by the Culture. When the goodness of people, that thing Kata and TWI believe in so strongly, fails to make a difference and the world becomes dark and bleak, there is a higher power there to bring down the hammer.

Now’s a good time to mention that I’m Jewish. We have a concept called tikkun olam—“repairing the world”. Tikkun olam is a moral imperative to make the world a better place, for the simple fact that it must be done, not for fear of chthonic punishment or personal gain. I’m not sure paba or Hungry or Banks were aware of the idea when writing their stories, but it is the beating heart of all three. I’m tired of grimdark cynicism, and all three of these works helped me believe I could write a story about goodness, and about the obligation to enact it. Obviously, “good” is subjective, and therefore moral quagmires are endemic to any story that wants to be about tikkun olam. So—

Let’s talk about Worm, the fourth story on this list.

It’s probably impossible to write a superhero webserial in the year 2024 without acknowledging Worm’s influence; I doubt it needs much introduction. Of these four works, it’s the first I read, and at the time it didn’t actually leave much impact on me; I binged it in about ten days in high school and then didn’t really think about it until I started reading TWI and other webserials. With the benefit of hindsight: I don’t like Worm. It’s not a bad story, all things considered; it’s a perfectly serviceable story about villains. 7/10, 8/10 in parts.

Sunspot is very much Worm spitefic. They’re similar in the basic setup: stochastic distribution of superpowers which may-or-may-not themselves be alive. Sunspot intentionally draws very different conclusions from this on both personal and geopolitical scales than Worm does; I dislike its insistence on a superhero-supervillain dichotomy based on this setup. There are other points which Sunspot is explicitly trying to do better than Worm: for instance, Worm is painfully, glaringly, almost offensively cishet throughout its entire runtime. Also, it dangles “Nazis bad”, that most freebie of free squares on the literary morality bingo, and then obstinately refuses to actually embrace it. It doesn’t even really have commentary on the matter. And that’s to say nothing of the theme of tikkun olam, in which Worm is entirely disinterested outside of the requisite superhero fiction “save the city/world” once the scale got big enough—which is so obligatory it basically doesn’t count.

I’m not derailing this entire A/N to rant about Worm for no reason. It is, in its own way, as big of an influence on Sunspot as the first three works on this list. It provides a roadmap of elements for me to avoid and do better than it did, and that’s just as important as the things to aim toward. Worm fans, don’t murder me.

Whew. Anyway.

Note the lack of a magical girl entry on this list. I’m actually rather under-read on the genre, and desperately need to brush up on some of the classics, which I’m nervous to admit to my audience when so much of the story has to do with the Radiances’ performativity in imitating what they think is mahou shoujo. According to readers, I seem to be doing an alright job of hitting the mark, so fingers crossed I can keep that torch burning. Please bear with me.

There are a lot of other more minor influences on Sunspot. Some of the tone and dialogue comes from some rather trashy but close-to-my-heart Warhammer 30k smut fanfic which I will not disclose. Some of its thoughts on violence come from Kill Six Billion Demons. I’m not that well-read on actual story structure, but a lot of the knowledge I do have comes from OSP Red’s Trope Talk videos. And of course there are countless more, various stories I read as a kid that contribute little bits and bobs I’m not consciously aware of. More recently, I’ve been watching a lot of Dr. Who, which is probably coloring how I do dialogue. C’est la vie.

Outside of media, there’s one more thing which is really quite important to Sunspot—okay, no, two more.

Firstly, I live in Japan! You may have seen this one coming. The depictions of different landmarks and the locale and just the general experience of Being In Tokyo all come from personal experience, and I’m hoping my love of this city and country come through in the writing, even though Ez is kind of out of the loop on all that stuff. I know some authors are pretty private about this sort of thing, but it informs the story too much for me to try to hide it. Ez’s feeling of displacement comes from my own, though I can neither confirm nor deny whether I am living with a group of hot magical girls who are weirdly interested in transing my gender.

Secondly, a lot of Ez’s experiences prior to the beginning of the story are based on the pandemic. Unlike the real world, COVID-19 didn’t happen in Sunspot, but his life being suddenly cut off by a random global calamity and him responding by retreating into seclusion and online social spaces obviously does draw from my own personal experiences, and those of quite a lot of my readership, I imagine.

I think that just about covers what I wanted to talk about in this. Hopefully you…got something out of it? I don’t know, I’m just sort of yapping. So let’s just end it here. Thanks for reading!

See you all in three weeks!

(Also, a for-fun poll:)