This story was originally published online separately as Champion (Chapters 1 – 4) and Change of Heart (Chapters 5 – Epilogue). As ever, many, many thanks to Karen “Kraken” King for the Korps setting, and also the use of her characters Caleb Hagen and Sunrise. Likewise, the following characters appear by permission of my dearest friends, the gaggle of gay animals who comprise the Monsterfucker Book Club: Carmen and Volta belong to Syntax-Takes; Vixie, Russell, and Rabble to Vixie Foxpaw-Moondew; Liam and Martin to Lexi (Shapeless Ink); Dawn and Orion to Runa Fjord; and Betty to Mabel Greysmoke.

The original genesis of Maddy was, basically, that I wanted to have a ‘fifteen minutes into the future’ contemporary OC, to interact with my friends’ contemporary OCs. I enjoy writing in the “Historical Korpsverse” niche, but it ended up that the characters I’d spent a lot of time fleshing out before this story—and who were intimately tied to, e.g., the specific historical context of being a closeted queer public servant in 1990s Ottawa—didn’t make much sense to write doing supervillain spy intrigue in this setting by the 2020s.

As to Maddy’s characterization, I wanted to work out some complicated feelings about career success in my old job, since coming out as trans in the late 2010s. In the end it was just too toxic; I quit in the early 2020s for a position where I didn’t feel obligated to be the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion component of middle management.

Relatedly, my fursona Grace is very close to a pure self-insert character in these stories, and she’s specifically spun out from a wish-fulfillment answer to the question: “What if I’d transitioned earlier, and not made certain life and career choices I regret?” What I realized in writing Change of Heart is that Maddy (while not fundamentally me in the same way as Grace) is actually something of a rebuttal to that fantasy. Even if I’d had the knowledge and self-awareness and necessary epiphanies to transition earlier than I did, I surely would still have made other bad choices. And so Maddy did!

Similarly: Slider. I was very happy to see how much readers enjoyed him as a medium-threat-level antagonist as this was published serially, and I won’t say it didn’t influence me; I was considering all kinds of directions for him as I wrote, including some I discarded foremost because of being the wrong person to do it.

In the end, though, I think it was a good call to just write Slider as a very ordinary, boring jerk of a coworker; That Guy who can’t be written off solely as your usual maniac, like Caleb Hagen or Roger Oakes, but remains obnoxious to work with as a trans person. Neal Salton is smart and basically competent (if prone to the arrogant overconfidence that’s his repeated undoing), and clever enough to keep his harassment plausibly deniable around others. That’s a much more difficult kind of transphobe to deal with in some ways, because they better understand how to carry out their antagonism under the radar of ‘allies.’

It’s surreal, in some ways, revising these notes in 2024. Change of Heart isn’t where I started writing fiction, nor even fiction in the Korps setting, but it’s where a lot of things started coming together—especially the extensive collaborations with my dear friends in the MFBC. Maddy wouldn’t exist as she does without all of their enthused feedback, and subsequent sheep-bear (or “beep,” playfully) stories would only continue that thread…