Yesterday I said that, to celebrate the upcoming release of One Salt Sea, I would once again make five blog posts detailing the background aspects of Toby's reality. This is the first of those posts.

liret asks "Can parents of changelings send their child off to the Summerlands alone and stay with their mortal spouses? I got the impression that Amandine was as stuck as Toby after Toby went through the Changeling's Choice, but I was wondering if arranging for a foster-family and writing the kid off was also possible."

The short answer: No.

The longer-form answer is, naturally, a little more complex.

For those of you who aren't aware, the Changeling's Choice is the process via which changeling children (fae/human crossbreeds) are presented with the two sides of their heritage. Pick fae, be whisked away to Faerie and never see your human family again. Pick mortal, your fae parent has to kill you on the spot. There are no takebacks; this is not something that can be negotiated. The Changeling's Choice is a necessary part of playing fairy bride.

The only exceptions are the weak-blooded fae, like Stacy or Marcia. Their magic was clearly strong enough to have triggered the Changeling's Choice at some point, since they're in Faerie, but if either of them were to have children with a human, there's a fifty/fifty chance that those kids would never manifest measurable magic, which means the Choice would never be triggered. (This is how we wind up with merlins.) Toby slept with Cliff knowing she might get pregnant, and chose to ride the odds as to whether Gilly would fall into that "magic too weak to become visible" sub-category. Since Gilly is still with her mortal family, and they haven't noticed anything unusual about her, Toby's gamble appears to have paid off.

Now, here's the thing: when a changeling is removed from the mortal world, either through abduction or death, they don't just vanish. That would leave too many questions unanswered, and could result in people searching for their children long past the point where it would be safe for Faerie to have them looking. Toby's father found bodies in the remains of the house; Natasha and October Daye were both declared dead, and were buried in Colma. Toby's father is buried next to what he assumed was his wife, but was actually a night-haunt's mannequin.

So could someone send their kid packing and stay with their mortal spouse? Sure, if they were able to convince their liege (and everyone has a liege, even if it's just the local King or Queen) that they could absolutely sell the idea that their child was dead, find a foster family, get the kid to choose Faerie, ship the kid off without getting caught, and manage to weather the aftermath of the "accident" without making any mistakes or getting accused of murder. Hint: this is very, very hard, especially given that most fae are incredibly attached to their children. Many purebloods think of human lovers as nothing more than a convenient way to get a baby, and would never even consider picking a spouse over a child.

In the event that a fae parent somehow convinced their liege that they could pull all this off, and then actually did manage to pull it all off, they would never be allowed to see that child again, and would have a seriously hard time convincing other fae to date them, since they have just proven that they're shitty parents. (I am aware that this is an apparent contradiction, given the fae fosterage system. Most societies are built on minor contradictions, and at least under normal fosterage, you'll eventually get the kid back. You know. When they finish being a teenager.)

So it's logistically hard, emotionally difficult, and culturally frowned upon. Technically, it's possible. Functionally, it's something no fae parent would really consider doing, even if they wanted to.

I haven't been blogging about my cats recently.

Some of you may have breathed a sigh of relief when you realized that you had entered a relatively feline-free zone. "Finally," you said. "She's going to talk about something that doesn't meow." Others may have been concerned. (I've heard from the concerned contingent, not from the relieved, but I have no trouble with the idea that both sides exist. Honestly, I don't demand that anyone be interested in everything I have to say, and that includes my cats, machete collection, horror movies, the X-Men, and candy corn.) Even more of you may well have been confused, given how focal cats have traditionally been around here. But I haven't been blogging about my cats.

John Scalzi has just made a lengthy post about the shit female bloggers get that he doesn't get. Go and read it. I'll be honest: after more than a decade on the internet, I find his experiences to be pretty spot-on. I make a controversial comment, I get death threats, comments about my weight, accusations of bitchiness, comments about my weight, offers to "fuck the stupid" out of me, comments about my weight, insults, comments about my weight, and, best of all, people swearing up, down, and sideways that I deserve whatever I get. It's been a few years since I've had a really bad troll problem, but when I had one, it was...

It was bad. It was "Kate monitored my journal and deleted comments before I could see them" bad, with a side order of feeling sick every time I considered getting online. I didn't sleep, I didn't eat, and I was scared all the time. It's invasive, and it's scary. Cracks about my weight aside, I'm not that big, and if someone wanted to fuck me up, they could. Easily. (Is this a motivator for my large and oft-discussed machete collection? Possible! Anybody comes to my house with the intent of doing me a mischief in the woods, they will not be thrilled by the results.)

And I haven't been blogging about my cats recently.

I'll be honest: I understand people being dicks for the sake of being dicks. We're all a little mean when we've had a bad day. My mother used to snap at me, even though she loved me. Sometimes I pick fights with my friends, or snarl at my co-workers. Human nature sometimes trends toward asshole, and no matter how hard we work to control it, it's going to happen. What I don't understand is why being a dick towards a woman on the internet so often turns into a) threats of violence, b) sexual insults, c) threats of sexual violence, or d) comments about perceived attractiveness/weight. Or violence toward the things that woman loves.

I haven't been blogging about my cats recently, because someone has been sending me email, from dummy accounts, threatening to kill my cats. In graphic detail. They know what my cats look like, thanks to the amount of blogging I have done in the past, and they've been able to get really, really specific in what they're going to do. Why? Because I got my cats from a breeder, and not from a shelter, and that means I need to suffer in order to understand the suffering of the cats waiting for adoption. "Bitch," "cunt," and "whore" feature heavily in these emails, which is always a nice seasoning for my rage and terror stew. It's all very gender-specific.

And they're threatening to kill my cats.

So no, I'm not going to talk about them right now; not until this email stops, not until the trolls find something else to chew on. And yes, I realize that making this post may reawaken some of my old trolls (and oh, Great Pumpkin, I hate it so much that I even have to take that into consideration), so I'm going to be watching comments carefully. Anything insulting will be deleted. Anything malicious will result in an immediate banning. I mean that. I am not going to let that shit stand.

We need to stop acting this way toward one another. We need to remember that there are humans on the other side of all those keyboards. We need to be decent human beings, because otherwise, everything is going to fall apart.

And none of this changes the fact that if the fucker who's been telling me what he's going to do to my babies comes anywhere near them, I will probably be going to prison for assault.

Some days I hate being a girl.