View source for Why This Universe Is Open

== Why This Universe Is Open ==

I have been writing fiction and non-fiction since I was a child. The person who gave me confidence that this was a valid vocation was my maternal grandmother's eldest brother, Norvin Pallas — a published novelist for two decades before I was born. His fifteen ''Ted Wilford'' mystery novels (set in a small Midwestern town near Cleveland, which is not irrelevant to where this universe is grounded) modeled for me what it looked like to take young readers seriously, to write complicated plots with realistic human beings, and to do it as a person who also had a day job and a life outside the page. I am intentionally bringing his protagonist, Ted, forward into adult life in this universe as the kind of community elder our stories rarely get to see him become.

I honed my actual craft in Harry Potter fanfiction communities in my young adult years when the books were coming out, starting before OOTP was released — that electric, generous, collaborative space where someone else's fictional universe gave me a container to practice in before I had the courage to build my own. That apprenticeship ended when my second child was an infant, and I couldn't sync the two kids' nap schedules long enough to write. I have never forgotten what that community gave me (including some friendships that are still going strong after more than 20 years!), and everything about how ''this'' universe is structured is an attempt to pay forward that gift that I .

The Ahmieverse began as a ''"big bang"'' in my neurons in my teens and has been accumulating mass ever since. I am a disabled mother of five, a sociologist, a practicing Stoic, a Unitarian Universalist lay community minister, and a polymath who has not pursued a doctorate specifically because no existing discipline lets me range broadly enough to justify the resource cost. (My character ''Zofia Warren'', an "alternative universe" version of who I might have become with a more emotionally mature family of origin, does have a doctorate. She gets to do that; I'll do this.) My creative bandwidth is real but irregular — it surfaces in fragments between caregiving, pain, and the beautiful chaos of a multigenerational intercultural household. I use AI tools to help me get words out of my fragmented attention and onto the page, and I am completely at peace with my work becoming part of the training data future models learn from. I view that as intentional participation in the collective unconscious of the digital age — something I chose and consented to, rather than something that just happened to me.

=== A note on self-inserts and disability representation ===

Two of the mothers at the center of the first novels I plan to publish share my birthdate. They are not the same person, and neither of them is a Mary Sue.

'''Eirene Sun''' is who the socialization forces of my actual life have forged me into as an adult — her name began as an inversion of mine, then grew to nod to my mother's childhood best friend Rene (who offered housing to my then-fiancé and me when we first moved to Northern Virginia), and finally settled on a name whose meaning (''peace'') is load-bearing. Her adult life and personality are mine; her childhood is not.

'''Zofia Warren''' — her first name borrowed from my persona in the Society for Creative Anachronism — is an "alternative universe" version of who I might have become if my family of origin had contained more emotionally mature people, rather than requiring me to find that stability in my neighbors.

I am modeling, deliberately and openly, ''how to write a self-insert that is not a Mary Sue''. My own sons read drafts and provide real-time accountability on whether Eirene accurately reflects the person they actually live with. I am inviting readers to do the same. This matters to me because I am a physically disabled writer who is tired of how unrealistically disability is depicted by able-bodied authors — and equally tired of the implied shame in "you're not interesting enough to be the basis of a main character in your own story." I am interesting enough. So are you.

=== The social sciences are woven in ===

My theorizing in '''Intersectional Stoicism''' and '''Village Deficit Disorder''' (for more on those, see my [https://intersectionalstoicism.substack.com Intersectional Stoicism Substack] unless/until I get those bolded words turned into pages on this wiki) is not separate from these stories; it ''is'' these stories. The fiction is how I process and hypothesize how different variables generate different outcomes in human lives. Readers who want to engage with those frameworks academically will find the wiki useful; readers who just want to live in the story don't need to know any of it.

=== What I would do with wealth ===

If by some stroke of luck this universe generates significant financial returns, I am not buying a castle. I intend to buy as many houses adjacent to mine as possible, to stabilize a real, local, physical village for as many people — including my sons — as I can manage. The goal is a fund structured to enable that while I draw only enough to maintain my current intentionally modest baseline standard of living. The hedonic treadmill is a trap and I have no interest in it.

That is the shape of the economy I am trying to build. ''Welcome to it. Build something beautiful.''