The Birth of the Solstice War

Welcome to the first “The Solstice War” supplemental post. I’ve been meaning to start doing these for a while now since they’re something I promised on the Patreon. However I couldn’t figure out exactly what to write about. I figure then that it’s best to start from the beginning.

Of course, every story starts with its author in one way or another, so let us start with me.

I have been wanting to write The Solstice War in some form or another for years. My childhood was very difficult in a lot of ways, I lived in a rough area, money was not always on hand, and I had nascent ideas about queerness that I could not admit to for fear of retribution. One shining light in my childhood, oddly enough, was video games and militaria of various sorts. I loved watching documentaries about wars, reading articles about wars; especially World War 2. My favorite games were strategy games: I loved Starcraft, Command & Conquer, and so on. Later I found far more difficult war games about World War 2, such as Panzer General, Operation Europe and Combat Mission. When playing any of these games, I’d often imagine myself as the voiceless commander that is often the player character in them. It made me feel less powerless about things. Later I discovered shooting games where you could be a soldier IN World War 2, like Call of Duty, and that was almost as good as being the commander.

I especially liked when I could play as the Soviets in video games, at first because they were different than the others. Though all the Western media I consumed was quick to vilify communism, I found it fascinating. As I learned more and became an adult and found sources that weren’t fed through a western lens (Marx; Lenin; a wee bit of Mao) it became my political ideology, despite the hatred I knew I would face for it. I figured I was already a queer hispanic person in the US; I was already hated. I might as well be true to myself and be a dirty commie.

Ultimately, of course, I grew up, and I knew that war wasn’t just my fun, it was not simply something I did on the computer to feel like I was strong. In fact, it became disgusting to me that I found it a source of strength. All those chits on the board, back in 1941, were people, and they died, and they did not die simply because I fumbled with the UI or didn’t know the game’s rules properly. So for a while I tried to swear off all that stuff. But I kept getting back in. My life was not getting better and I needed distractions. So I could never quite let go of war entertainment.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it was generally more harmful to me to hate myself for liking these games, than it was to attempt to construct some kind of principled abstinence from them. I know intellectually that war is bad. I know intellectually the history of World War 2 from all sides of the conflict (though my particular focus has always been the Soviets). I understand it, I respect it (what deserves respect). I have different ideas about war now, which have come from shedding noxious notions of strength that I held as a put-upon and hurt little boy.

When I’m feeling down though, I’ll still boot up Company of Heroes or Unity of Command.

This became more problematic when it came to my other hobby, and my biggest passion: writing stories. Ever since I was 12 I loved writing stories. I wrote little stories on notebooks and tried to get my friends to read them. When I found out that the internet, and especially forums, fanfiction.net and fictionpress.com would allow me to reach tons of people with my scribblings, I was the most elated kid in Puerto Rico. I wrote a lot of stuff during my childhood and teenage years. My writing matured, but I eventually came to a point where I was very self-conscious of what I was writing, and convinced myself it wasn’t good enough to do it. That lasted about 2 or 3 years in college, as I was finishing my English degree and received a lot of encouragement from my department not to write fiction, and especially not to write the dreaded “genre” fiction.

So instead I tried to write stuff for tabletop RPG games. I regret wasting time on that.

 

In late 2011 I decided to get back in, with stuff like Ladybird that was quirky, and dumb, and that I didn’t have to take seriously. It built up my confidence, but I knew I was avoiding writing dramatic fiction, and I knew that I wanted to write it. (Though I also want to write Ladybird, but I am one person who is occupied enough with a single story as it is!) I rewrote Ladybird a bunch of times, and constantly found myself writing “first chapters” of Ladybird that redefined her origin, because I wasn’t satisfied. Even now I have another origin in mind!

That’s kind of when I realized writing origins was pretty destructive sometimes and it is better to start ahead and assume the origin has happened already. But that is beside the point right now.

For a long time I wanted to write a war story, mostly just to do it. I know a lot of stuff about war and about the time period of World War 2 and I felt like I could write a very interesting story with this knowledge. I didn’t have any particular political aims for the war part of the story: my writing has in general always been fairly political, but not really about war itself. Ladybird is a story that is leery toward capitalism and moneyed democracy, open to queerness and coloredness; that is my writing in general, and that would also be any war story I wrote. Of course, it would also force me to deal with those apprehensions I have toward war as a piece of entertainment. I don’t want to write a story stereotypically “critical” of war because I do not believe the pacifist message helps empower oppressed people such as queer folks and colored folks. But I also did not want to write a celebration of war, because celebrating war attracts the kind of people I am heartily disgusted by, like nationalists and racists of all sorts. Military fandom is highly, rigidly conservative and reactionary. I wanted an ambivalence of war; and a focus instead on the people and the ideologies behind it.

That is when I got the core idea for the Solstice War: a look at a World War 2-styled conflict from the perspective of a communist nation toward which other, capitalist nations are committing violence driven primarily by economy and ideology.

Over time this core would expand in different ways, which I hope to talk about more in the future once I have collected all of my thoughts on the subject. I find writing about writing to be difficult to do objectively or scientifically, because to me a greater part of writing is sort of instinctual. When I was seven years old I taught myself English by watching English television and picking up thesauri and dictionaries. It has always been an obstacle to my thinking of English (and writing) as a specifically contrived practice that constructs objects. In a way, I “just do it.”

So, here’s hoping that subsequent entries in this series grow more coherent and not less.

One thought on “The Birth of the Solstice War

  1. That’s interesting! I really like getting perspectives behind something. (Also, now that the stories are eBook’d thanks to Patreon, I need to load them up and slot them into my reading queue.)

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