{"id":14328,"date":"2025-07-16T12:14:48","date_gmt":"2025-07-16T17:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/?p=14328"},"modified":"2026-02-24T13:10:26","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T18:10:26","slug":"when-i-was-edgy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/when-i-was-edgy\/","title":{"rendered":"Once upon a time when I thought I was edgy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
When you say stupid shit and read it back almost 2 decades later when you\u2019re cleaning up your blog
\nPart 2 of a series<\/p>\n

Magdalene: a contest and a prize.
\n03\/28\/2011
\n[link removed]<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n


\n\"\"<\/p>\n

Magdalene<\/em>, the third book in the Dunham series, will be released on Sunday, April 24, 2011. This is the last book in the series with contemporary characters; book four, Dunham<\/em>, is an historical and book five, tentatively titled Delilah<\/em>, is post-apocalypse<\/strong><\/span>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Delilah<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Post-apocalypse.<\/p>\n

Polyandry.<\/p>\n

Delilah and sisters Jezebel and Lilith, daughters of Duncan Kenard, granddaughters of Bryce and Giselle Kenard.<\/p>\n

It, like most everything I\u2019ve published, is an outgrowth of something I wrote in the 1990s that I wrung into the Dunham universe or cannibalized for something else in the Dunham universe.<\/p>\n

I was all into it when I was forty and my libido was super-charged. I researched other polyandrous fiction and realized someone else did it better than I could, ever would, and mine would be seen as derivative, even though the added twist was that these people are Mormons<\/em>, and given our history, i WaS gOiNg To TuRn PoLyGaMy On ItS hEaD<\/strong>. \"\"I don’t remember who wrote what or when. I just noted that someone else had done a good polyandrous novel, so I shelved Delilah<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the late 21st century and a prototype chemical weapon is accidentally released (in Los Alamos, where else?). It was intended to kill selectively based on DNA (mitochondrial DNA?); its target was supposed to be people who trend to alpha, risk-takers, smart. It was not age-selective. Instead, it kills the weak. (Basically, it culls the US population for the best and<\/i> worst, leaving not much in between.) It wipes out more than 2\/3 of the US population, and what\u2019s left are basically the barbarians. Further, it kills far more males than females. It amps up the males\u2019 aggression and the females\u2019 fertility. So of course, the Dunhams are barbarians anyway, but now they\u2019re just more<\/em> barbarous.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pre-writing this post: \ud83d\ude44<\/p>\n

Then I went and re-read. Shit, I\u2019m good. I was, even back then when I started it, in 2008. Well, of course, I\u2019m good. I wrote the Great Mormon Novel<\/a>™.<\/p>\n

\u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n

PROLOGUE<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019M JUST ANOTHER middle-aged woman who thinks she can write a book.<\/p>\n

At almost a hundred twenty, I still have a good hundred years of life left in me. We live longer than the previous generations, you see. It was one of the ways in which our biology was changed at the chromosomal level way back when, or so my father tells me. My grandmother died young\u2014she was only ninety-two\u2014but he says that generation considered ninety-two to have been a long, good life.<\/p>\n

I never know what to make of that.<\/p>\n

Anyway, we\u2019re doing marvelous things with technology now, my husband and children and I. We\u2019ve revived the internet somewhat, pioneering the mining tools to dig through the archives of the data detritus of the people who went before us. In fact, that\u2019s our family business, investigating people\u2019s histories, their ancestries, things that had been recorded in oftentimes excruciating, tedious, and mind-numbingly boring detail.<\/p>\n

The mining of Facebook and Twitter alone have made the fortunes of several of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. The Church was one of our first clients, and we have been its chief (sometimes only) mining company for forty years or so.<\/p>\n

People have a need to know where they came from, especially after having spent so many years trying to hide their ancestry that they simply forgot what it was. They want to know the names of those who didn\u2019t survive, what they thought, how they lived, why they mightn\u2019t have lived, if their personalities were somehow indicative of the genetics that doomed them to death.<\/p>\n

My husband is the ringleader of this enormous family\u2014and business\u2014we created. One day, he came home from work and said, \u201cDel, I think you should write a book.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA book?\u201d I asked. \u201cWhat about?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou. Us. You know, from the beginning of us. The stories the kids beg you for, only not so sanitized. All the gory details. In forty years, I have yet to come across any memoir of that time, much less a good one.\u201d<\/p>\n

I thought about that a minute. I didn\u2019t have anything much else to do lately since my daughters had decided I needed a housekeeping staff. I don\u2019t like to travel, you see, and I wouldn\u2019t without my husband anyway, and he\u2019s too in love with his work to leave for long. We are wealthy and I have not had to manage our farm for four decades now.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t as if I didn\u2019t remember. It\u2019s to my advantage that I remember\u2014as do my contemporaries.<\/p>\n

That was another thing that changed in our biologies: our memories, which are long and detailed. There is no Alzheimer\u2019s, no dementia. My father marvels at that.<\/p>\n

He\u2014my dad, that is, Dr. Duncan Kenard\u2014assists the family in the business, contributing his medical knowledge and research here and there, his hypotheses and theories, but for him it\u2019s a hobby. His real love is in treating patients, to study how much more superior the human body became after the change. What we take for granted\u2014robust health, \u201clong\u201d lives, few chromosomal defects\u2014he considers miracles.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust tell it from your point of view. That way, it won\u2019t exactly be incomplete, if you know what I mean.\u201d<\/p>\n

I did. \u201cThat makes me uncomfortable,\u201d I said slowly. \u201cI\u2019d feel funny, putting myself out there like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

He gave me a strange look. \u201cYou\u2019ve been mining blogs again.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true. I like to read the old blogs, the ones from the twenty-first century, and I start talking they way they wrote, which my family thinks is hilarious. They were incredibly, ah, \u201cemo,\u201d those generations. Too whiny by half, but their internet culture was alive and well with its own limited vocabulary that was incredibly expressive for a medium that couldn\u2019t convey tone, body language, or facial expressions.<\/p>\n

And their obsessions!<\/p>\n

Would that we had had that kind of time when our lives fell apart, and especially\u2014<\/p>\n

Their obsession with sparkly vampires and dominant billionaires can entertain me for hours. Oh, would that the vampires we had had to deal with had been sparkly and emo, instead of a treacherous government. I would have even taken the dominant billionaire over what we had to go through.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat you should do,\u201d my husband continued, \u201cis write it like you\u2019re telling someone else\u2019s story.\u201d<\/p>\n

I thought about that another minute. \u201cI suppose I could manage that. Sometimes it does seem like it happened to someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere you go. And,\u201d he added brightly, \u201cmaybe it\u2019ll keep you occupied while you get through menopause.\u201d<\/p>\n

I slugged him in the arm, but he laughed.<\/p>\n

After a hundred and four years of marriage, I probably ought to be used to his little digs. On the other hand, I\u2019ve been having hot flashes for the last twelve years and things are critical.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m losing my libido and fertility, you see, the thing that defined me for so many years\u2014to myself, to my family, to the government, to my church and neighborhood and community\u2014and I can\u2019t wait until the process is over.<\/p>\n

Ah, but with a lifespan three times the length of my ancestors\u2019 comes a longer fertility cycle, so Dunc says, which makes a ten-, fifteen-, twenty-year menopause about proportional (and that\u2019s not counting half again the number of years of perimenopause). My best friend is in her seventeenth year and menopause, like the post-catastrophe libido, is a beast.<\/p>\n

The source of my husband\u2019s amusement is his gratitude. He hasn\u2019t been able to keep up with me for several decades now. He\u2019s enjoying the slowdown, the relative infrequency, the ever-increasing occasions when we can take our time, when the infrequency makes it special and not, for me, a need akin to breathing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat about Lil and Jess?\u201d I asked, wondering what my sisters would think about being equally exposed. Their lives were inextricably bound up in mine. I couldn\u2019t leave them out of the telling of such a tale.<\/p>\n

He shrugged. \u201cThey\u2019ll get over it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yes, I remember how it was before we changed\u2014we all do, those of us of the First Wave\u2014but it just seems like an extraordinarily vivid dream.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m going to write it that way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2605\u2605\u2605<\/p>\n

No. No, I\u2019m not.<\/p>\n

\u2190 Part 1<\/a><\/p>\n

Part 3 \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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