To make finding things easier, and because I'm writing more these days, here are my GO fics on AO3:
My entry to the GO Minisode Minibang 2024, The Serpent of the Loch, the story of how Crowley accidentally created the myth of the Loch Ness Monster, with amazing artwork by @piratewinzer.
Antoinette, a Rebecca-inspired Ineffable Wives AU:
Morningstar Abbey, a take on Austen's Northanger Abbey:
Mission: Ineffable, now a series inspired by the Mission: Impossible movie franchise:
And quite a few more!
Not to mention, my original historical fiction Diplomacy is also now posting on AO3, updating twice a week:
I try not to fall into the "I never liked their work anyway" ditch when an artist/creator reveals themself to be a terrible person
BUT
a feeling I do have and will stand by is "While I enjoyed their work overall I did have some gripes that I overlooked out of affection and whimsy, but now that my loyalty is gone and my affection tainted there is nothing holding me back from enumerating my many grievances, to which the revelations of the creator's shittiness may or may not provide a new and infuriating context."
#such a good summation of this actually#because yeah there’s usually things that were always present#but which were easy to overlook or give the benefit of the doubt#that suddenly become relevant after a revelation about the creator#and it’s really not the same thing as the self-defensive “’I never liked it anyway’
I am saying this as a Gen Z queer, before y’all get your guns out to fucking shoot me.
But I need y’all to understand that if someone doesn’t give you their government name in a queer space, it’s not because they’re “mysterious,” and you do not have permission to take it upon yourself to figure out their “real identity” and go digging for them online like a private investigator. First, that’s creepy and a violation of privacy and reasonable boundaries. Second, some of us keep our private and professional lives very separate because we need to keep food on the fucking table and a roof over our heads, and our private life could jeopardize that.
“Why won’t you tell me about your parents?” “Why can’t I know your real name?” “Where do you work?”
1.) Not all our parents would bake us a fucking cake when we come out. Some of us are closeted. Surely you understand this? You also do not need to know my parent’s names or occupations; we are both adults. I do not need nor want to mix you and my private life with my parents and my public life.
2.) Trans people do not owe you their dead name or government name
3.) I’m not telling you for the sake of job security. I am a government fucking caseworker working amidst a fucking lavender panic!
“There’s no way you’re a different person outside this; you’re still you at your core. What harm is there—”
No, I am a completely different person. A different person with a different personality and different interests and a different name and presentation. I am a completely different person because I keep this life and my public life private to avoid fracturing 90% of my interpersonal relationships and 100% of my professional ones.
“You’re not out? But you’re so confident.”
See— that’s part of the issue. Y’all assume someone is in the closet because they hate themselves or lack self-identity. Some of us know exactly who we are, but need to prioritize financial stability or else our entire life gets exponentially harder immediately.
You meet queer people over the age of 40 and one of the first/earliest questions is “who knows?”
I need y’all to start bringing that energy. Because it’s not always safe for someone to be out and not everyone is safe to be out around.
There is a misnomer that “the closet” inherently means “doesn’t know they’re queer” and not “isn’t out widely and publicly.” “Outness” is often a patchwork.
TV Crowley’s Aging Rock Star Shtick is fun, but if you want to take Book Crowley's Vibe to our modern day, I think there's an argument for, okay... here me out... the Vibe I always got from Book Crowley is that he projects out a very ‘Rich Douchebag’ image, not necessarily in the sense that he is a douchebag (I’d call him more of Lovable Lil’ Shit) but in the sense that he goes to great lengths to cultivate the exact image in the time and culture he lives in of a ‘Rich Douchebag’. Like, he’d always make sure he’s up to date to all the current societal standards and norms and all the current fashion trends so that he is always trendy and sooo cool… but deliberately in the specific way that’ll make humans look at him and go “man, what an asshole.” And that’s what makes ‘blending in with the humans’ feel like a job well done to him.
In the late 80’s-very early 90’s era that the book takes place in that meant coding him as a Yuppie, thinking about his stock options as soon as Armageddon comes up, his sleek lifeless showroom flat, the dedication to always having the most modern tech (even when he finds it to actually be pretty crappy or otherwise useless to him, it’s necessary for ‘the kind of Human he’s trying to be’)….
So, thinking about what’s up with Book Crowley in the current day, and if he's maybe trying to update to fit our current image of what a Yuppie-like Rich Douchebag is.... So, like, I’m not making a statement on whatever or not Book Crowley would use Crypto in the 2020’s, even for one of his schemes, but... I think there is an argument to be made that if you met Book Crowley in the current day, you’d take one look at the guy (gender neutral) and immediately get the Vibe that he uses Crypto. And Crowley would just be like “Great! I am getting a good grade in seeming like an absolute sleazebag, something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve! :D”
I ended up having a really interesting conversation with some people at the bus stop today. They were getting out of some sort of ‘clean and sober’ meeting and had starting saying how they were so bored because they didn’t have anything to do, and had to stay at home because all their old friends would pull them back. So I said something like, ‘So this is the time to do all the stuff your parents told you they didn’t have money/time for!’
“Whatcha mean?”
“You know, like when you were five and you REALLY wanted to have that toy or do that thing and you were like, ‘Please mom please I gotta have this I gotta go do this’ and they went ‘Hell no you think I’m paying for that do you want to goddamn EAT?’ “
And this light went on in their eyes. The lady is going to go check thrift stores for an Easybake Oven and I told her about Wilton cake decorating classes. The dude is going to Griffith Park and ride horses, because, ‘I always wanted to be a cowboy, and you can’t drink when you’re on a horse ‘cause you’ll fucking die!’
Fuck it. This is what being an adult is. Sure it’s bills and work and relationships, but damn it, it’s also time to do the things you LIKE.
I signed up for a free class/lecture on Water Gardens. I’m going. It’s time.
no joke, this is such an important aspect of overcoming trauma. I mean the trauma of abusive parents, the trauma of broke ass parents who got toxic because of it, the trauma of capitalism. Like fuck it. Go to Wrestlemania. Build a shit ton of terrariums.
Alright, I've got the first of many new projects to share today! This is a custom binding of on the same page, a Good Omens human!AU by Chekhov, in which Aziraphale and Crowley are both authors (one of religious literature, the other of smutty romances) who not only write parts of each others' books but also for the duration of the fic are pretending to be married so one of them can land a book deal. There's so much pining, friends. Pining all over the place. I even put pines on the cover.
We have skivertex green faux leather up there on the cover, for the spine and fore edge. I originally intended to do corner caps but I like this look better and it's easier to measure. Lots of long vertical lines. Title is in pewter HTV and no, I still have not learned my lesson about weeding swirly fonts. I will never learn. I wanted it to look like a romance novel with literary pretensions (this is a compliment) and it absolutely does. The tree print is scrapbook paper, though I've forgotten where I bought it. The story is set at a big fancy house in the woods in Vermont, so it's perfect.
Have a look under the cut for more photos!
Photo of the spine, in which the swirly script font persists. I really wanted this book to be a flatback but it had just a bit too much swell, so it got rounded. The bookmark is dark gray, matching the htv, and the endbands are handmade. The leather extends further on one side than the other, I know. We are none of us perfect. It's damn cute though.
The endband colors were chosen to match these endpapers. Funny enough, they were bought for a different story. This fic is set at Christmas time, though it isn't actually about Christmas, so these ones with more of a winter motif were a good fit (better than they would have been for the story I bought them for, which was overtly a Christmas Fic). This theme continues once we get inside.
The title page has a holly frame. The setting is strong in this fic, out in the woods and kind of cozy, so it felt right to use a lot of greenery.
The image on the left up there, with the pinecones, originally had a twee little scene with a horse-drawn carriage in the middle. It was adorable but didn't suit the story, and that frame was too good to pass up, so I edited it out and put this quote from the author's Chapter 1 summary in there. None of the other chapters had the kind of summary that would work for this, but I thought this one worked really well to set the scene, so it's the only one I kept. And we have more holly in the frame around the chapter numbers. I grayed this one out so it wouldn't fight with the text. It was a little dominating when I had it in black. This softened it up. All the images are via rawpixel and in the public domain.
And that's that! The first of many. Hope you liked!
There's a non-zero chance that a prominent British fascist will lose his parliament seat (in a by-election he himself called) to a man wearing a garbage bin on his head.
This must be how all the English common folk felt when Romeo and Juliet first came out like what do you mean we paid a months worth of wages and stood here in this dirt mosh pit for hours and THEY’RE DEAD?!
*disclaimer this is a dramatisation I know there’s many ways to interpret the finale
Historians and Shakespeare scholars please correct me if I'm going off in a direction, but I reckon a relevant difference might be that back then, people didn't really give a crap about the concept of spoilers.
You only get like six lines into R&J before it straight-up says the young lovers take their lives. It's not like people had to sit there for long before they knew what they were in for, lol
Happy disability pride month to everyone with ptsd, happy disability pride month to everyone with complex ptsd, happy disability pride month to everyone who questions if their problems are big enough to count as a disability, happy disability pride month to anyone who questions if their problems count as a physical or mental disability, happy pride month to everyone who has a disability that causes people to stare, and to those whose disabilities are hidden, happy disability pride month to everyone who deals with any kind of disability physical or mental, you’re all badass and I want you to remember that this month okay
No matter how progressive or well-read you are, there are always going to be moments in your life where somebody pushes back against something that's so culturally ingrained you never even considered it before. And you'll say "Huh, it never occurred to me to challenge this but you're right" and that doesn't mean you were "morally toxic" before, it means you're a non-omniscient human capable of growth.
I stopped trying to be a perfect ally, because A) It's not possible, and B) I sucked at it, so with the above mindset as an approach, I instead aim to be the kind of ally that marginalized people are comfortable talking to when I screw up. I feel like it's a lot more achievable.
You have to be more invested in hearing other people's experiences than you are in being "right". This will actually help you in many real world situations.
