juliantics

|| Juliana | 30s | she/her et al. ||

[antique-symbolism]

Hi, I’m Juliana! I like to write fantasy and sci-fi stories about good people making mistakes and fixing them as they try to do right by the people they love. 

*****

Miniature Roses: A scientist and her vampire test subject fall in love in the early 20th century as they work together to discover an alternative diet to human blood.

(CURRENT STATUS: revising second draft)

Magnolia, Stay True: At the height of American Spiritualism in the 1920s, a skeptic's mind and heart are tested when she meets a beautiful medium with powers she can't explain.

(CURRENT STATUS: writing first draft)

A Brief Family History of the Magical Mundane: Three college students embark on a summer road trip to a supernatural party of epic proportions, reconciling old familial wounds and unearthing new ones along the way.

(CURRENT STATUS: reoutlining; formerly "Cat and Cleo's Guide to Cross-Country Liminality"/"CCGCCL")

You can find a guide to navigating my writing tags here. Besides media and writing, you may also see posts on my blog about: art, linguistics, Magic the Gathering, fashion, cosplay, natural science, and cultural history.

I'm always looking for more creative mutuals (writing or otherwise) who want to take an active role in getting to know and supporting each other's work. Feel free to send me a message or interact with this post!

[antique-symbolism]

What if everything works out. What if I get the call Friday that HR is extending the official offer to intern with our aquarium's cetacean scientist. What if I go home riding the high on that for the next 24 hours and then I wake up Sunday morning feeling totally healthy and not at all sick and I road trip with my friend and we dive in unseasonably warm quarry water and have a great time and all my new gear works perfectly. What if I go into work the next Monday and give my two weeks notice and then I get to spend the month of May visiting friends and travelling and diving before starting my new position in June and it's a new era and it's good, it's good, it's good. What then.

[antique-symbolism]

Most of the things I've hoped to work out since I moved here didn't. With a rejection email this morning, this internship joins as one of many in a very long list.

I did go diving with my friend yesterday. About a week before the trip when I told him about my hopes to break out of this spell of disappointments, he said, In the end, it has to work out. You put one foot in front of the other, and it has to.

So, in the end, I'm sure it will. I've been doing nothing if not putting one foot in front of the other.

I'm going to take a break from social media, hopefully for real this time. I'm going to try to focus on figuring out a path forward. When I come back, I hope something worked out to tell you all about. If not, then I still have feet, and I still know which direction is the front.

Wishing us all better things ahead than we're leaving behind.

[hellenhighwater]

So I bashed my head into the ceiling fan light fixture in my bedroom and destroyed it (my head is unscathed) and have since replaced it. However. I've decided to turn the mangled remains of that light fixture into a disco solar system, so I'm painting up some disco balls. Mayhem is a VERY big fan of disco balls.

[hellenhighwater]

Oh! I forgot to post the fully finished version of this! Maybe eventually I'll get up early enough to catch it in the sun but it's honestly not in the best spot for sunlight. Which is what I get for making a big project with no idea where to put it.

[ruhaniya]

"you should be at the club" i should be by the sea. i should be in the mountains. i should be at the moon. i should be awestruck and rendered speechless by the majesty of the natural world. if you even care.

[chamomile-teabag]

WHAT ARE YALL READING RN you must tell me

[elliegoose]

by calling it "time theft", the state created a crime that sounds even cooler than simply dicking around while on the clock, something which is already incredibly cool

[briarpatch-kids]

I desperately need y'all to see this scam bot I just got:

[parksrway]

our beautiful pale blue dot welcomes you home!

[sashayed]

would you rather have in-unit laundry (washer/dryer) or an in-unit dishwasher?

in-unit laundry; i consider myself generally messy

in-unit laundry; i consider myself generally neat

in-unit laundry; i am neutral on the messy-neat scale

in-unit dishwasher; i consider myself generally messy

in-unit dishwasher; i consider myself generally neat

in-unit dishwasher; i am neutral on the messy-neat scale

Voting ended onApr 11

no other nuance bald vanilla option. put it in the tags if you must. this is for science.

[angrychicagoan24]

i’m gonna say something that will probably piss some people off

i do not think “kill all men” is a good or productive thing to say in any situation

[angrychicagoan24]

obviously this probably fucking sucks to hear as a trans guy but it’s pretty shitty to cis men as well who do not deserve to hear it and honestly it’s not even helpful for men who kinda do deserve to hear it! all you’re doing is adding to hatred on both sides and that literally helps no one

[angrychicagoan24]

i’m very glad people in the tags have been talking about race and stuff which is something i probably should’ve mentioned in the main post

[triangleguy]

im starting to understand the utility of the hand emojis. ive always been a 👍 enjoyer. its one of my go-tos. 💪 is also great. But☝️<- this one has been very fun lately. and🫵is also very good. 👆is great for agreeing with somebody and 🙏is good even though i dont actually pray. But it gets my point across. 👋is also great although not the most versatile. same with 👏 and 🤝. 🖕is a classic though. i need to start incorporating more of these ->👊✌️🫳✋🫲🤏🤌

[writing-prompt-s]

Humanity has finally reached the stars and found out why no one had contacted us. The universe is in a sad state. As such, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, and many othe charities go intergalactic.

[lyricwritesprose]

The thing the recruiters don’t tell you about space battles is that you die slowly.

Ships don’t blow up cleanly in flashes and sparks.  Oh, if you’re in the engine room, you’ll probably die instantly, but away from that?  In the computer core, or the communications hub?  You just lose power.  And have to sit, air going stale and room slowly cooling, while you wait to find out if the battle is won or lost.

If it’s lost, nobody comes for you.

It had been about half a day (that’s a Raithar day, probably a bit shorter than yours) and Kvala and I were pretty sure we had lost.  Kvala was injured, Traav and I were dehydrated and exhausted, and Louv was dead, hit by shrapnel when the conduits blew.

Most fleets give you something, of course.  For Raithari, it’s essence of windgrass.  I looked at the vial.

“It’s too soon,” Traav said.

Kvala gestured negation, shakily.  She had been burned when conduits blew, and her feathers were charred, and her leftmost eye was bubbly and blind now.  Even if we were rescued, she probably wouldn’t survive.  “You know we’re losing the war.”

They couldn’t deny that.  “It doesn’t mean we lost the battle.”

“Doesn’t it?  The Chreee have better technology.  Better resources.  And they have their warrior code.  They don’t care if they die.”

“We can’t give up!” Traav protested.  They were young, a young and reckless thar who had listened to a recruiting officer and still believed scraps of what they had been told.  “Any heartbeat now—”

There was a clunk.  Something had docked with our fragment of the ship.

“You see?!” Traav crowed triumphantly.

Kvala exchanged glances with me.  The Chreee never bothered to hunt down survivors.  What was the point, after all?

The Aushkune did.

There weren’t supposed to be Aushkune here.  They were supposed to hide in nebulas.

But if there were—

If there were, we were too late.  The windgrass couldn’t possibly destroy our nervous systems in time to stop the corpse-reviving implants, and once you were implanted, it was over—or it would never be over, depending on how you looked at it and whether Aushkune drones were aware of anything—

Footsteps.

Bipedal.  The Aushkune were supposed to be bipedal.

And then the blast door opened, and a figure stood in it.  My first thought was, robot?  That’s almost worse than Aushkune . . .  But no, it was a being in some sort of suit.

Who wore suits?

“Friendly contact,” the suit’s sound system blared, as the being moved over to Kvala.  “Urgent treatment.  Evacuation.”

“Who are you?”  Kvala struggled upright.

Despite the primitive suit, the blocky being was using up-to-date medical scanners.  “Low frequency right angle shape,” it explained—or maybe didn’t explain.  Two more figures came into the room and put Kvala firmly onto a stretcher.

“You’re with the Chreee, aren’t you?”  Kvala was not at all happy to be on a stretcher.

“Not Chreee,” the sound system said.  “You Man.  Soil Starship Nichols.”  The being hesitated.  “Rescue Chreee as well.  On ship.  Will separate.”

“You what?” I said faintly.  Who would do that?

“Oath,” the being explained.

“What kind of oath?  To what deity?”

The shoulders of the being moved up and down.  “Several different.  Also none.  For me, none.  Just—oath.”

I exchanged glances with Traav, who looked as unsettled as I was.  I had never, ever heard of groups cooperating when they couldn’t even swear to or by the same power.

The being scanned me.  “Have water,” it said.  “Recommend.”

Raithari have fast metabolisms.  I could—would—die of thirst quickly, and painfully.

“Where will you take us,” Traav asked, “after you give us water?”

“Raithari to Raithar.  Chreee to Chreeeholm.”

“Chreeeholm would kill them for failing,” Traav remarked.

The being hesitated, and then said, “War news sometimes bad.  Sometimes lie.”

We had learned long ago not to believe the recruiting officers, but what did that have to do with anything?

“And you—what?” I asked.  “Just fly around looking for battles and rescuing victims?”

The being seemed to consider this.  “Best invention of soil,” it said finally.

Most of what it was saying didn’t make any sense.  Did it worship soil?  But it had said that it had sworn to no deity . . .

Madness.

On the other hand—war was a deliberate, rational act by deliberate, rational people, and I wanted no more of it.  So why not embrace madness and see what happened?

“Soil Starship—Rrikkol?” I asked, stumbling over the word.

“Yes.  Soil Starship Nichols.”

I followed the being in the suit.

[phoenixyfriend]

Took me well over a minute to realize "low frequency right angle shape" was Red Cross.

[pyromania2014]

This whole thing is brilliant with translation stuff.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[serratedpens]

Shannon Pratson, "Still Life with Sky, Coffee, Tulips, Anna Karenina, and God"

[boykeats]

[ID: excerpt from a poem reading,

"Grocery store tulips. Empty coffee cup in the sink. Morning sky smeared pink, like the inside of a salmon.

I have been lonely in so many cities and now I am lonely in absence of the city, the crowd at the Met that made me small and whole as a seed.

How do other people pray?"

/end ID}

[apollomission8]

"We copy heart, and we copy bracelet"

(Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman's reaction to hearing his daughters were watching from mission control)

[havingapoemwithyou]

Spoiler by Hala Alyan

[akindplace]

do you guys remember when we googled something and we would get results that were actually related to the things we searched