Madeira Darling is a snarky mystic, devout Satanist, serious Marxist, laughing dominatrix, and writer from San Fransisco where they live with their boyfriend in a house full of altars to their various demons.
White collar worker and executives: “Hurray, it’s labor day weekend! 3 full days off! We are so fortunate to live in a Great Country that Cares about it’s Workers!”
Service industry workers who know labor day weekend is one of the busiest 3 days of the year which means double or triple shifts and not seeing family all while being forced to be not only polite but cheerful:
While also knowing that Labor Day was intended as a holiday for them and they still have to put up with this shit
Labor Day in the US exists to supplant the actual international Worker’s Day of May 1st (May Day, which originally started in the US) in which all laborers were entitled to a day off.
Capitalist bosses called “Communism” and tried to ban before giving a “patriotic American” version. Now May 1st in America is called “Loyalty Day” to “for the reaffirmation of loyalty to the United States and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom.” (Dwight Eisenhower oversaw that proclamation, in the midst of a red scare, in 1921.)
I was asked to write a general-purpose writer biography for the upcoming anthology Darkest Midnight in December, as opposed to the one that runs in Wraeththu Mythos books, and this is what I came up. I had to mention Star Trek.
They are about a post apocalyptic woowoo world of beautiful hermaphroditic post humans that look like extraordinarily pretty dudes, and are generally Mary Sued up to eleven because they are BetterThanHumanityTM and are good at magic and faster/stronger/more resistant to poison/longer lived and have weird leathery eggs called pearls (that are only conceived by choice) that produce perfect fast developing babies, and they follow basically the end of the human era and the beginning of the Wraeththu (yes that’s what they’re called, fuckin seriously, though they’re also called Hara, with the singular being har… it was written in the 70s) and the development through the process of alchemical development of one particular har becoming the king of everybody because the first Wraeththu (who is also their main god, Because that’s how reality works in Storm Constantine land) says it’s a good idea for him and the boyfriend he thought was dead to be kings of everything together. There are crystals, the entire thing was inspired by Bowie, and Storm herself is a fuckin’ reiki master. Also it follows the good Gelaming’s war with the evil Varrs who enforce what amount to gender roles on their people, whereas the Gelaming… sort of also do that but not as loudly.
OHH and incidentally, Wraeththu initially start by transfusing their blood into human men (not women, that just kills them until you find out later IT TOTALLY DOESN’T BECAUSE OF REASONS) which causes them to go through a sort of hideous process in which they necrotize, rot and are reconstituted, and then have to fuck another Wraeththu within like a week or they get all fucked up because the transformation wasn’t “set” and their genitals look like flowers…the Gelaming and Varrs are basically two separate kingdom sand basically my story for an officially sanctioned short story collection was about a human dude, who was incepted, accidentally killed his girlfriend by fucking her (Wraeththu jizz is canonically corrosive to humans because why the fuck not) and is just like endlessly pissed and horrified by how everyone talks like they’re trying to get Joseph Campbell to notice HOW MYTHIC they are, and by the ridiculousness of having the slightly more effeminate hermaphroditic beings being the ones who are supposed to be consorts rather than regents and produce young… and monarchy being just like acceptable because “Well god, who by the way is hanging out over there, being kind of a twat, said so”