About Me
Hi, I'm Mataeus Montez, or Rain Jur online. I've been an independent novelist for almost a decade, publishing my first novel (Blood Lake) at 13 years old the summer before high school. Inspired by my furry side, I'm pursuing a career in bioengineering to offer humanity a leg up in self expression.
Experience:
Writing:
I started to enjoy writing my first year of middle school. I took English assignments seriously and tried my hardest to write the best in the class. (Despite my efforts and honest work, I received a failing grade on every assignment because of teacher discrimination.) After I moved back to attend Flagstaff Academy, I took Creative Writing in my final year, enjoying the class so much it became my goal to pursue it as a career.
I won the "Most Likely to Give J.K. Rowling A Run For Her Money" award for graduate superlatives. It's hung on my wall to this day. Although my skills were laughable at best, I spent years writing down every wild and wacky story idea I could think up and will continue doing so until it's run dry. I have no reason to be so proud of this.
Drawing: Like your average kid, my drawing didn't start any place special. I picked up pencil and paper and sketched my character from my favorite classic 2d sandbox game: Terraria. I liked the process and continued drawing little scenes from the game, documenting my progress along my path toward the end of the game. I drew little scenes from little fairytale stories I had come up with, these fairytales eventually evolving into how I see myself as a furry today. Most of my actual art skill progression was done in middle school, where I drew scenes to visualize scenes from Blood Lake, which was the book I was writing at the time.
Becoming a Furry: I believe this story is probably among the strangest. Usually, people become furries when they get a little too involved in questioning their human form after watching films such as Zootopia or Beastars or FNAF or whatever it may be, but mine came from a dream I had some time between the ages of 6-8. I was up the mountain with my dad, spending the night in his camper trailer for the weekend, fire blazing in the potbelly stove at the foot of the futon bed I helped unfold. I lay on its dirty surface underneath the heaviest feather blanket you could imagine, gently nodding off to the sounds of winter whispering into my ear from the window. I woke up excited the next day, for a revelation I had dreamt up. I immediately called for something to write what I had dreamt down. What I created was possibly what I'll cringe at for the rest of my life; But in that dream, I was a fluffy red fox.
This character was "me". When first saw this drawing, even though I thought it was bad, I couldn't stop looking at it. It was a mirror to some other vision of myself. So basically I was pretty obsessed. It was actually my first book series ever, written in the interesting way 10 year old kids like to write. It was grammatically terrible, but an interesting window back to how I got this way. I've always stuck with a fox for my fursona species because that's what I've always been. In the forest with my little brother and my little step brother, I would play this character in trampoline games and zombie-fighting games. Not only was it a fun character to play and just exist as, it was also an escape. When times got rough, me and my brothers would run away to the forest to slay zombies with our long stick swords and guns and pine-cone grenades. Of course, when I got into virtual reality and the furry fandom, these feelings were all normalized, and I was able to bring out my artistic skill with feedback and inspiration from others.
Excerpts:
(potential spoilers)
(Man-Made Structures) A person stood at the exit to the forest. I rubbed my eyes, quickly returning to the opening. They quivered as I squinted into the landscape, stunned in place as they frosted over. The man raised his arms at his side, facing the building in front of him. Embracing the building in front of him. Something seized my lungs, holding my breath against itself. Holding me captive in a prison of silence, no matter how hard I wanted to scream. I could only look on as my father approached the gates of hell, walking up its doorstep and into its false promise.
(Serenade of the Shattered Cosmos) Like most others, I had found my passion in science looking to the stars. With this passion, I originally focused all of my studies in astronomy, but eventually I decided to pursue particle physics after learning how empty the field was. During my youth, I attended astronomy classes at Arnos University, a charming community school in the middle of my hometown. It was a brick building that stood just a bit higher than the surrounding architecture down a crowded one-way road. I’d always remember the mosaics built into the faded red brick walls, colorful glass beads cascading portrayals of the night sky down the building walls and into the road, where they flowed in and out of windows and store doors and were accompanied by the gentle flapping of artistic garments strung from old drying-lines above. The road was often busy, so the school wasn’t always easy to get to, but being crowded down that road let me get familiar with each stone on the wall.
(The Spaxium Mine) Lefushi arrived at the location. The ship came to a halt at the edge, staring into the infinite blackness just ahead. They were at the edge of the universe, peering into the endless expanse of nothing ahead. Every aspect of every life they had lived was now literally behind them, and they were about to cross the threshold. The stars had ended, afraid of what lay inside. A quiet beeping receiver was their only remaining connection, grounding them within the boundaries of existence. The connection between them and everything they had ever known had been reduced down to a quiet reminder of the past in their peripheral. Once they arrived, their civilization would have advanced so much that the tech of their time would be considered ancient. The receiver played a single tone, repeated every few seconds, the only tether to reality. The Komlughs watched their radar systems intently for any sign of the Hylla, the endless void returning nothing.
(Serenade of the Shattered Cosmos) I stepped outside, holding my helmet to my side as I stared out toward the rising sun, squinting my eyes. I raised my arm to shield the sudden glare, taking a long breath before setting off into the frigid wasteland. The cold air painted icy artwork down my throat, immediately being whisked away by my warm breath. The snow was loose, crunching beneath my step as the door shut behind me, and I could see that the sun was now noticeably higher in the sky, hovering above the mountaintops as it chased the frosted clouds away. My breath hovered in front of my face for a second in the still air, fading away as it floated upwards. I hadn’t been past the doors for a while, so I had lost a little bit of what it was like to be out there, and I was surprised how fast the skin on my face went matte black. I had eaten well before I left, but the sudden shock in temperature must have jolted my thermoregulation systems to believe I would actually have the hope of absorbing heat out here.
(Serenade of the Shattered Cosmos) Ever since Orange Beam was founded, other countries and companies have been trying to work under our skin to pry information from us, and since we wouldn’t give, we kind of became a target to the whole world. Tenzenaga obviously took note of that fact, but didn’t want anything from us. The country was under strict surveillance and security almost all of the time, so it was likely they had their own laboratory. The Magnatron was in a residential area, buildings sat inside of its ring. It would only take one war crime to put an end to everything we were doing. Unluckily, Tenzenaga doesn’t have a very good relationship with lughic rights, and you all know where that went. I couldn’t be more grateful that our house was far away from the accelerator, and although I’ve worried about my family, I can have the comfort that the exclusion zone didn’t get near Renka at all.
(The Spaxium Mine) “The void has Anti-memetic properties. I’ve woken up 4 times now and don’t remember a single one of them. Every time I try to write a message down for when I wake next, the message corrupts, and I cannot open it. I see that I’ve written thirty messages in various media, but I only remember this one. It feels like this is the first time I’ve woken up since launch. I have to describe what I see. Julkan has woken twice, and Yukon three times. They have all written messages of their own, but I presume they are just like this. I can only hope this one is different.
“I’m not saying this out for anything in particular, just… I hope that once we make it out of this, it can be heard.
I see nothing but beautiful colors outside the ship, rainbows and shapes everywhere; it’s like being inside of a physical drug trip. I can’t describe in words what it looks like, but I know these aren’t natural shapes, not RSE’s― this is a society, and we’re in their territory.”
