A Tribute to Tesslyn
Babbling about Tesslyn, an old favourite author of mine.
I'll start by saying that this is probably going to be a weird tribute. I'll try not to edit it or retype it if I can really help myself. I feel like, though we never really talked, Tesslyn would be the type to appreciate candour.
The Mating Season is the greatest series I have ever read in my life. The greatest unpublished, at least. I don't recall whether Tesslyn first posted The Mating Season; Wolves Run Wild on Yiffstar or Sofurry. I just recall stumbling on the story when it was listed among the most popular of all time on Sofurry's archive, a few months after the transition. I'm terrible with my memory of the passage of time, and it's hard to arrange everything into a comprehensible timeline, but I definitely read the first chapter before Tesslyn had posted the last.
I never commented, and I regret that, truly. I regret it like I regret the other (numerous) and horrid mistakes I've made in my life. I think I posted one comment on Tesslyn's Sofurry profile page, long after...he or she had left. Wow. I'm such a huge fan of Tesslyn's work, but I don't even know his/her gender. But...I don't think he or she would think it matters, terribly much. Being a bisexual is hard enough, being a furry is hard enough, being alive is hard enough. But upon reading the note that Tesslyn included in the downloadable pack of the entire Mating Season series, I realised that I didn't even know the meaning of the word hard.
The first time I read Mating Season; Wolves Run Wild, I didn't even make it to the end of part bloody one before I ejaculated. It was just that damn good. Tesslyn took raunchy, rude smut, and made it into something special. I've gotten bored of a lot of things, and I've become desensitized to yet more, but The Mating Season never fails to bring me to orgasm. Or tears.
Tesslyn once said that writers are stereotypically miserable people, for they write to escape. Well, The Mating Season was my escape. One of many, but the only one that has stuck with me to this day. It's irremovably a part of me now, attatched as I am to the characters. I always feel like I'm looking in places I shouldn't be, though. I mean, I fancy I can tell where Tesslyn is speaking from experience, through the wonderful, wonderful world he or she portrayed. It took me a long time to get comfortable with the idea that I was reading something, however minutely, biographical. That was about the time The Mating Season stopped being a series I read to get my rocks off.
The first time I cried, I cried when Kilyan was raped as a young boy, by a lone wolf. It resonated with me strongly, more strongly than I could remember feeling anything before. I was crushed, shattered, uplifted and overjoyed all at once.
Let me be as equally blunt as Tesslyn had been. I was raped, at a very young age. All through my life, my memory of the occurrence has been called into question, brushed aside as wild fantasy. My mistake was never telling anyone at the time, before my reputation grew as an "extraordinarily inventive boy". We were both young, actually. The feelings never sunk in until I'd witnessed this fictional rape of Kilyan, for whatever reason. But it did sink in, and I sobbed like a hurt baby. A good twenty minutes I spent, unable to continue reading.
When I finally pulled myself together, I carried on reading, and I'd never felt so happy for a character to die, as I did when that lone wolf died. It scared me a bit, actually. How invested, emotionally, I must have been in the series to be affected like that. But as I read on and was enamoured further with the epic...quintology? Sextrilogy? Heh, number puns. Anyway, as I read on, I figured it didn't matter. 'Cause I was enjoying what I was seeing, I was becoming immersed in this world. I cared about the characters, and some of the things Tesslyn wrote them into made me genuinely shocked, and upset.
I admit, once or twice I wanted to stop reading as a matter of principle, and ask Tesslyn why he or she was such a massive douche. But hey! I kept reading! And I understood how important those events were to the development of the characters.
As I've grown, this series has been a companion through both a terrible puberty and my first failed steps into adulthood. And I like to think that The Mating Season still has things to teach me, things that Tesslyn learnt the hard way. So I'm grateful that I can benefit from this painfully-earned wisdom.
I'm aware I sound like a colossal geek, a creepy-ass stalker and more, but to be honest, I couldn't give less of a toss. I just want to wish Tesslyn well, wherever he/she is, and remind him/her and everyone else of something his/her mindblowing creation taught me.
We pay a price for every second of happiness we experience. But we get our god damned money's worth, so giving up is never the answer.
Thank you, Tesslyn. And I'm sorry for never commenting. I like to think we could've been friends, maybe, if I had. Pity parties don't seem like your thing, but I am sympathetic toward you for what you've gone through. So there's that too.
And to everyone who isn't Tesslyn who is reading this (as unlikely as it is Tesslyn him/herself ever will) then I swear upon my integrity and my good eye for a hot sex scene, that The Mating Season will never disappoint.