Diurna Times

↳ The Story Behind the Story ~ Carolyn_Hill

Written by mminecraftbees

Hello and welcome to the interview column, where today I'm talking to Carolyn [Carolyn_Hill], author of Watty award-winning novel Mask of Celibacy. We discuss her reaction to achieving the award, the ideas behind MoC and life as a published author.

Thanks for talking today Carolyn. First off, congratulations on bagging the 2021 YA Watty Award! How did it feel to find out you'd won?

It was a dream come true! Ever since I'd started writing on Wattpad in 2016, I'd dreamed that one day I'd win. Winning an award for a book so close to my heart means the world to me.

Mask of Celibacy, the book that landed said award, originally began as a multimedia novella under the title Celibate. Why did you choose to opt for a multimedia work instead of the traditional prose style of a Wattpad book?

The idea came to me when I visited someone's Wattpad profile (I can't remember who, I'm afraid) and read the term 'asexual'. Can you believe I initially thought it was a typo? No one talked about this kind of stuff when I was a kid. Sex education talked about the biological aspects only.

Once I looked up the term, it sparked a tsunami of research (articles, forums, videos, et cetera) that finally connected the dots on how my sexuality worked. Or rather my asexuality.

The novella Mask of Celibacy began as a quasi-journal, where I struggled with all my questions through the eyes of the narrator Jess. The story is my own 'what-if' scenario: what if I'd learned about asexuality as a teenager rather than at the age of 36?

What motivated you to rewrite Celibate as a novel?

As dear to me as the novella is, it has structural issues. Rewriting it as a novel allowed me to restructure it. Since I'd already captured all the feelings and the internal struggle, it meant I could focus on technical aspects such as flow, plot, pinch points, and character arcs, which allowed me to breathe life into the story.

MoC tells the story of Jess, a nineties teen on a journey of self-discovery surrounding her identity and the possibility that she is asexual. For readers who've never heard this term before, could you give a brief description of what asexuality is and what it's like to live as one in a sex-centred society?

People always say that asexuality is a 'lack of sexual attraction'. This is technically true; however, I find it problematic to define a preference by a 'lack' of something. It makes us seem flawed or incomplete.

Instead, I would say asexual people tend to or prefer to others on a platonic, emotional, sensual, aesthetic, intellectual, and/or romantic level rather than on a sexual one. That includes our significant others. It doesn't necessarily mean sex is completely off the table, and many asexual people are sexually active. It simply means people attract us mostly via other means.

A sex-centred society discusses these levels interchangeably. They separate relationships into platonic friendships and romantic/sexual relationships, or they possibly see romantic relationships as one big melting pot which combines all the levels together.

Some of us prefer certain levels over others. For others, sexuality plays little to no role in attraction.

Why is it important to you to spread awareness of asexuality?

When I was young, no one talked about asexuality. I didn't even know it was an option. In fact, it took until the mid-nineties for the DSM-IV to revise its definition of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder to preclude to asexual people.