Anita Zara

Writer, reader, and aesthete. Formerly ThatMysteryWriter on ao3. Author of The Maid’s Secret: A Gothic Monster Romance and My Carmilla: A Sapphic Vampire Romance

[wallflowerstudio]

Cats rule the world - unknown artist, ca 1931

[starlitmyre]

"what if they fucked" WRONG. what if they ruined each other's lives irreparably. what if there was nothing left but a smoldering heap. what if everything that brought them together twisted and corroded and ripped them apart. and then they fucked.

[prunelya]

Le Baiser de Rodin

[trans-ralsei]

[trans-ralsei]

[caughtthedarkness93]

I love my job, but reblogging employment jelly for someone else I love.

[laurapetrie]

Oppressed with sleepiness, she went to bed and was snuggling down in the perfumed sheets when her eyes fell on the little table by the bedside. Someone had set a cup of hot chocolate there; half asleep, she reached out her hand for it and drank it. Her eyes closed and she fell into a delicious slumber where she dreamed of her lover, a prince as handsome as the God of Love in picture-books, and when he spoke it was with a voice that went straight to her heart.

Arthur Quiller-Couch, "Beauty and the Beast" from The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales from the Old French (1910)

[oracle-fae]

katie daisy

[icantdothistodaybruh]

Ciel July Day 3rd \ Favourite artist as reference original piece "The Swan Princess" by Mikhail Vrubel

🕊🕊🕊

[wonderstruck]

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

[lethiflora]

I love female characters who are so relentlessly, keenly, irrepressibly clever. Women who play games with the narrative and manoeuvre other characters like pieces and hone their intellect with self serving prescient caprice.

[uzs-deactivated20260224]

choose yourself this year

[fibbunny]

It’s fine because I’m actually using a secret technique called writing it in my head and nowhere else.

[stone-cold-groove]

Illustration detail from an ad for the Atwater Kent Model 20 compact radio receiver with detachable horn speaker - 1925.

[majestictortoise]

puttering around the house is an underrated form a self-care. make some tea or coffee. put on a podcast. sort the mail. tidy some pillows and fold some blankets. start the laundry. thaw some soup. just casually wander around aimlessly doing little things to make your space and life a little nicer. who cares if you get distracted or only do a little. you aren't being productive. you're puttering.

[wholeheartedsuggestions]

here’s to all the things you survived quietly and privately this year

[anitazara]

Christmas things 🎄

[gr8writingtips]

writing tip #4013:

do a "draft zero". i think this means a draft with zero words. i will find out more and keep you posted

[gr8writingtips]

i've found out it's not that

[vefantur]

obsessed with the way that gothic horror is about horror but never directly. it’s not horrific because there’s a haunted house and that’s scary, it’s horrific because the monster isn’t a monster, it’s your grief, your loss, your pride, your desire, your fear. the monster skulking in the shadows, the darkness at the edge of the woods, the haunted house that is too broken to be a home—those are manifestations of events that grabbed onto the fabric of time in a fit of abject horror and clamped down so tightly that they couldn’t keep moving forward toward resolution and eventual dissipation like they were supposed to. it’s all about the scared child and the mourning mother and the hunger in your gut and the little emptiness in your chest at the end of the day. those things are all little horrors but you can’t approach them directly to understand them, so gothic horror gives us these little metaphors and says “here play with these for a while and see what you find.” and all of those metaphors need someone to go back to childhood to release them. you have to care, and be curious and clever, and look for a way to heal the hurt. you have to be so achingly human to survive in gothic horror