doomed by the narrative but not to death. doomed to survive. doomed to stay alive inside the story. doomed to never escape the narrative, not even through death. you are allowed no exit. there is no way out for you and there never was. you couldn’t die if you wanted to. the narrative has a hold on you and it won’t let go. death is too sweet a doom for you. the story has something much worse in mind. there is no way out.
I think we should write more straight relationships with 2010s TV queerbait tactics. Let that man and that woman's lives be horribly intertwined, let them take bullets for the other, let them be each other's meaning but NO KISSING. They are holding each other platonically. You're crazy for reading anything romantic into it at all tbh
Just wanna say, writers, ESPECIALLY male writers: PLEASE write friends who are intimate.
Write friends who can hold hands. Write friends who can rest their heads on each other's shoulders. Write friends who lock arms. Write friends who hug each other when they reunite. Write friends who share food. Write friends who say "Wow, you look pretty today". Write friends that get embarrassed at compliments. Write friends who carry their loved ones when they're tired. Write friends who cry at the thought of losing each other and collapse into each other's arms, clinging to them. And write this with any gender. Male friends, female friends, trans friends, friends with different genders
Especially post-COVID, we're faced with future generations who've got a lot of complicated emotions that feel unwilling to be open and vulnerable with their friends. Prove them wrong. Teach them that it's amazing to be loving and open and vulnerable with your friends. Put it in everything you write. Because a kid or a teen watching a show/movie/book/play and seeing two best friends holding each other while one cries, or holding hands when laughing at each other's jokes will have a more meaningful effect on them than you might think.
sometimes you have to remind yourself that drafts are like onions—layers upon layers of tears
In a world where being a robot is illegal. And people are racist towards robots. The robots are trying to have a heavyhanded civil rights movement. There's robot super crack that gives robots super powers. All robot racism comes from Senator Racism, who is running for president.
Our protagonists, model minority robot, and nice cop, must work together to ensure that Senator Racism is not elected. And guess what? They are lesbians.
I've updated the Art for Sale section of my website with some new drawings.
Female Power Romantasy novels can be indulgent as they like with giving the MC all the powers and hottest love interests and overcomplicated backstories, and I will cheer that on. Yes, there is a place for this! I see your vision, girl!
But the moment it starts talking about blood purity, her divine right to rule, and how ubermensch her babies will be with the man with the equally super special bloodline? You're doing girlboss eugenics at that point.
This blew up, so let me explain.
"Specialina has rare squirrel blood passed down from the time a secret ancestor married a squirrel god. This gives her super powers to climb trees and find nuts!" 👍👍👍 Inheritable traits are a thing after all.
"Because Specialina has rare squirrel blood, she is entitled to rule over the rodent kingdom, and if she is kept from her rightful throne bestowed by her ancestry, the vile rat people will continue to corrupt the land." ⚠️⚠️⚠️ Oops, no one is entitled to rule over others, especially through genetics. And think about why a certain group of people is your designated "evil" race.
"Specialina's love interest is McBroody, a man with rare rabbit powers. With both squirrel blood who have domain over the skies and rabbit blood who have domain over the land, their children will have domain over everything and become the most powerful beings on earth who will bring the kingdom eternal balance, thus the evil rat people do everything to keep these two apart." 🛑🛑🛑 STOP. DO NOT PASS GO. THINK ABOUT WHY THE HAPPY ENDING OF YOUR FEMALE POWER FANTASY IS HAVING GENETICALLY SUPERIOR BABIES.
plaint text : "Stop. Do not pass go. Think about why the happy ending of your female power fantasy is having genetically superior babies."
my story about four teenagers becoming ubermensch to kill the demiurge is quite leftist actually.
It wasn't until I'd nearly finished writing Curse Words that I looked back and realised that if you followed the very direct and unsubtle metaphor of the story then the unavoidable textual reading was "we should all be literally blowing up oil pipelines right now"
Which is a somewhat more extreme message than I ever intended to write
But you're not wrong
Perhaps but given that I haven't blown up any oil pipelines it does make me a hypocrite
normal halloween fantasy world w/ vampires & monsters & all that good jazz but the skeletons are just normal people who happen to be deceased but stuck around
like ghosts get the option to stay w/ their corpses instead of passing on so now everyone’s family is made up of like 3 living generations and your great-aunt Bernadine
sometimes family members die but decides to like. stick around. there’s a polite period of seclusion while their corpse goes through the decaying process, bc of hygiene reasons. then once the bits and pieces fall away you get a nice clean skeleton haunted by the un-aging spirit of a family member. and it’s not like they’re another mouth to feed, so they just spent their afterlife being passed around by relatives and offering free babysitting i guess
But, you know, you can technically speed up the decaying process. I could go feed a big ass murder of crows. And then have a nice bleach bath to get rid of the itty-bitty bits that got stuck. And then go to a bone engraver to get very unique designs, to make sure its hard to fake my identity. And also to be a really cool tattooed skeleton. I’d get back to my family after a week tops. The future grandchildren could color in my cool tattoos.
Fuck you, now I want to be a cool ghost skeleton. And I can’t. Fuck you
1. everything about this comment is good and right, catch me laying my skeleton out to feed the birds
2. i completely FORGOT bones could be CARVED, and for that i am shamed
gonna be the most badass skeleton babysitter
if you were a bare skeleton anyway I bet you could just Meccano in spare bits of unoccupied bone wanna be a bone centaur? find an unhaunted horse skeleton & stretch your legs
I know your whole shtick is cursed-content but I couldn’t help but make something a little wholesome. An elderly couple, Liam (the skeleton) and Rose (the little old lady). Liam passed away before Rose, but he chose to stick around and take care of her since they live alone.
“Its great great great grandpa’s turn to take care of the kids.”
This post gave me a surge of inspiration so here ya go. The big sis is painting a dragon on her old man’s arm, while the little bro is placing a flower crown on his head. Sorry its a bit blurry.
oh my goodness. i would absolutely love to see this in color if anyone is interested
You guys enjoy your centaur and tattoo skeletons, my short ass is gonna steal some tall boi legs and become MOTHERFUCKER UNLIMITED
The Shape of Ideas
big fan of 'i'd find you in every universe'. BIGGER fan of 'there are maybe five universes where we find each other and in four of them it ends badly i think we're some kind of anomaly i think every law of everything points towards this being the death of us. but we could try to save it anyway.' THATS the good shit.
woop there it is
It's one of the biggest reasons I could never get published. I'm too sick to do tours, videos, tiktoks, publicity, Influencing in general. Most of the time I'm too sick to write. But I could definitely never be the social media maven required now.
the one thing i want to be able to do as a writer is make people come back to something ive written. i want that piece of text to haunt them, i want their thoughts to be briefly consumed by this. i want this to be something they remember long after its time. thats the one thing i want to do
It's such an amazing feeling when someone picks up on something in your writing that you 100% intended but didn't think people would notice. Like, YES!! My writing properly conveyed the thing it was supposed to!!! You are so awesome for noticing that!!! I am so awesome for writing that!!! I feel so good about my story now!!!!
When people got that twist i had been planning for a year the moment i hinted at it
me: writing is my coping mechanism.
also me: *puts my characters through the same emotional turmoil i’m actively avoiding*
My therapist nodding: this is called processing in a safe way
You know what? I believe that you can finish your writing project. I believe you can update your fic. I believe you can work on your WIP. I don't care if you think it's cringy or bad. I don't care if we've never met or interacted in our whole lives. I believe in you. Keep going - you've got this.
