There are times when I wish I could write with the same blithe naiveté that I had as a kid, where I’d churn out pages and pages and pages of prose without thinking for a half a second about unfortunate implications and implicit messages and the depth and importance of stories.

I was writing utter crap then, but I was having fun doing it.

And now I know too much about the world, and I know the power that stories have, and I know that whose story you choose to tell and why you choose to tell it are important.

And I’d love to tell a Harry Potter-esque ‘magic exists and has always existed as part of a masqueraded underworld! Mythical beings exist! All the myths are true!’ story. I’d love to write a story that takes pieces of all these amazing Harry Potter headcanons I see on tumblr and runs with them in their own universe. One with character diversity and explorations of intersectionality and kyriarchy and how magic slots into these systems.

But the stories that I want to tell are about the scary-ass fairfolk and their baby-stealing iron-fearing ways, about selkies in Boston harbor and witches in Providence Place Mall.

But that’s European stuff. So what’s it doing in America?

If magic has always been real, why did colonialism and genocide roll the way it did?

I don’t want to tell that story. It’s not a fun story.

And I don’t want to tell the entire history of a world that went a very different way, because while that’d be a kickass story, it doesn’t get me to the 'the world we know, but with magic!’ place I’d like to get to. It couldn’t possibly be the world we know without all the painful, fucked up history.

And what good is magic if it can’t have altered that?

This is my beef with American Gods.

And I think the real heart of the problem is ’I am not intimately familiar with the stories of my own ancestors, because genocide and diaspora. I am far more intimately familiar with the stories of colonizers. How fucked up is that?’ and I have no idea what to do about it.

And that’s why I’m never going to get around to telling my “Normal everygirl gets sucked into magical underground masquerade world and has adventures there involving people who survived the changeling process, and the fairfolk being creepy and amoral and alien, and harbor selkies and library goblins” story.