Buy Assassin x Demon King now on Amazon or Ingram Spark!
Find me on ao3: b00mgh or on TikTok: b0rtney or on Substack: BrittneyHart.substack.com
Want to support me financially? Ko-Fi: b00writing or Venmo: b00mgh .
you want homosexuals in every conceivable scenario?
Boy oh boy do i have the substack for u: mine!
NO PLEASE LEMME TELL U THE STORIES BEFORE U LEAVE--
Current is Cinnamon Muffins. TLDR: Six queer boys in a homophobic tiny town in Iowa are trying to survive winter break dodging awful parents, social stigma, and mental health crises.
Next up is How to Get Away with Marriage. TLDR: Guy with awful, religious parents marries guy who is living paycheck to paycheck so they can both get all their younger sisters out of their shitty situations (but they fall in love ofc).
Longer desc of these plus the stories coming in the next months are below the cut! (Genres include fantasy, sci-fi, dystopian, mystery/thriller, coming-of-age)
Cinnamon Muffins centers on Taylor Macready, a homeless senior in high school holed up in a sleeping bag under a bridge after his parents kicked him out. He's fully ready to just accept death when it starts snowing on him while he's stargazing, but social outcast Wes Post is taking his nightly walk in a new direction and stumbles (literally) on his longtime crush, Taylor. Dragging Taylor home, Wes's parents prove themselves the only reasonable parents in this book by setting Taylor up on their pullout couch and nursing him back to health. Then Wes, whose closest school relationships include the kids who bully him for his anxiety-related speech impediment, has to get in touch with Taylor's friends to let them know the situation. Meanwhile, the mean girls of Swisher High School are starting a campaign to get homosexuality banned at school. Administratively, it gets nowhere, but it inspires several small-minded shitwads to take matters into their own hands. While Taylor is used to getting into fights, Wes isn't, but he'll have to sink or swim, because the teachers are not paid enough to care what happens in the hallways during lunchtime.
How to Get Away with Marriage opens with Luke Providence, son of a devoutly Baptist family in Nebraska, proposing to Patrick Demden, son of a recently-deceased alcoholic mechanic. The wealthy Providence parents have a longstanding agreement that once their children get married, they will receive a trust of $100,000 to use on the down-payment of a house and to start a life with their spouse. Patrick's younger sister tutors Luke's younger sister, but Patrick's sister is 16. This age gap doesn't matter much to the Providence parents, but it matters a lot to Luke, so he strikes a deal with Patrick: tell the parents he'll marry the sister, legally marry the brother, everyone gets to move to Colorado and escape abusive religious parents and crushing poverty. He needn't have done something so elaborate, Patrick would have married him for any reason at all. But the secret doesn't stay secret forever, and the Providence parents eventually come knocking, trying to recollect their children and their money.
Future stories I'll keep shorter, but feel free to ask about them either in the replies or my askbox and I'll elaborate!
Assassin x Demon King will be getting books 2 and 3! ADK is about an assassin and the king he was supposed to kill, both of whom have quit their jobs and started trying to save as many people as the assassin killed before he dies of a slow-acting poison in twelve months. Books 2 and 3 will have things getting awfully tragic and somewhat more horny than before! (No smut will make it into the print versions of these, that will remain on my substack alone)
How to Find Your Friends After the End of the World is a fantasy inspired by the isekai anime genre. Five friends in their 20s are on earth as it is wracked by a violent battle between the Heroine of the Gods and her Nemesis, and then, suddenly, they aren't. Earth has been destroyed and they are now on a new planet, in new (non-human) bodies, strewn across continents! On their new wrists, they have tattoos with each others' names, plus one (or two) new ones: their soulmates. Court politics and wastelands of monsters await them as they try desperately to reach each other, and their soulmates try desperately to reach them.
HtFYF will also have a prequel, focusing on the events that led to earth's destruction, and the battle between the Heroine of the Gods, a young woman, and her Nemesis, who seems to know more about the gods than she says. Why do the gods keep choosing such young heroes? What has the Nemesis done to put the world in such peril? Will the Heroine get to graduate on time despite the sleep she's been missing!?
The following do not yet have titles, but are fully fleshed out works ready to be thrown onto Substack:
A trilogy of eleven teens assisting in the fight against an agency that traffics, tortures, and then sells children with preternatural powers and abilities, and an exploration of the trauma those kids emerge with.
A murder mystery where a woman's sister dies, the police rule it suicide, and the woman enlists the help of a rumored contract killer to help her solve the murder-- but why does this rumored murderer-for-hire seem to know so much about her sister's death? And who was truly responsible?
A campy novel about a woman who graduates college, goes back to her hometown, and finds her highschool crush is still there, still single, and has since come out as gay. Of course, the only solution is to co-adopt an at-risk child from a neighbor.
This post will remain pinned on my profile, but for the next few days I'm having a sale on my substack tiers-- 20% off! That makes the cost to you just $8 per month to get a chapter every other day. 15 chapters for $8; that's a steal!
the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be a part of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.
Nobody wants to say this but in the sterek teen wolf dynamic Derek is the single mom who works two jobs and loves his kids and never stops and stiles is the dad who stepped up
I am retired!!! I retired in October of 2017 and have kept my promise not to exchange my labor for money.
Since 2017, I have only done stuff that I thought was interesting or useful regardless of whether it pays, because we have more than enough money, and despite what billionaires might tell you, there is literally no difference between "more than enough" and "much more than enough."
So I no longer work for money. But in retirement one must keep busy, which is why I have taken on an unpaid gig as the social media intern for a coffee and tea business that donates 100% of its profit to charity.
I also sometimes travel to universities and other places to speak in support of Partners in Health and global access to tuberculosis care, and sometimes I write books because writing makes me happy, and every Tuesday I make a video on vlogbrothers, and I make a podcast about the world cup with my friends from high school, and so on, but none of these things constitutes work. These are just Retirement Projects, which are essential to a happy retirement.
Upon the Hail Mary’s arriving at Erid, the Eridians In Charge Of Things eventually require both Rocky and Grace to provide formal recorded testimony regarding the deaths of Rocky’s Blip-A crewmates and the final outcome of the Blip-A’s mission. It’s mostly Rocky whose witness statements they need; Grace is primarily speaking as an expert consultant on the topic of lethal radiation, as supporting evidence for Rocky’s claims as to his crewmates’ cause-of-death.
No one on Erid is gonna accuse Rocky, one of the Saviors Of Erid, of any kind of foul-play regarding his crewmates’ deaths. The hearing is intended to legally close that door so that neither Rocky nor the Eridian version of the Petrova Taskforce can ever be sued by family or friends of the dead Blip-A crew. However, when Grace initially hears about all this, he gets the mistaken impression that someone is pointing fingers at Rocky, and he gets most of the way through shouting his way into the witness box as a character witness in Rocky’s favor, before it’s explained to him that that really isn’t necessary.
That’s not the only hiccup in the whole process, though. As there is no unbiased party immediately available with the necessary expertise to translate Grace’s spoken English into any Eridian language, Grace uses his old cobbled-together laptop translator to help him record his testimony. (Erid’s legal courts do have provisions for taking statements from Eridians who cannot speak out loud, but those provisions generally assume the Eridian in question can provide a silent statement in engraved Eridian language, which Grace also cannot do with acceptable fluency.)
It isn’t until after it’s all over, when Rocky and Grace are hanging out in Grace’s temporary human-habitat (pre-beach biodome), that Rocky realizes — Grace’s laptop translator uses clips of Rocky’s own voice for its English-to-Eridian translations. Grace is now formally in Erid’s legal records, providing formal sworn testimony, using Rocky’s voice.
Grace, who didn’t even have so much as a parking ticket (no car anyway) back on Earth, is technically now on public Eridian record committing Erid’s equivalent of identity fraud.
I think it's pretty cool that Merlin is okay with murdering someone every week. Always makes me sad when they make him well-adjusted in fanfics. Let that man be insane
Grace mentioning to Rocky that he used to watch his ship every evening after they parted ways (and do complex math to figure out when he's going to lose sight of it completely). Grace is. a little bit embarrassed about the whole thing.
Rocky is ecstatic.
"Grace watched Rocky sleep, question? Even though we were apart??"
Everyone knows the first day of Friend Grace’s class is nickname day. It’s the day when every pebble is on their best behavior to try and make sure they get a cool nickname, something unique that they can brag to their friends and classmates about.
Sometimes, Grace will do it without thinking. That’s how Kiddo and Buddy got their nicknames. Often, Grace will nickname students after their coloration. Gaia got his nickname because he’s blue and green, and apparently looks a lot like Earth. Violet got hers because she’s purple. (She was initially disappointed since color means nothing to Eridians, but then Friend Grace showed them violet flowers and said that humans often associated purple with wealth and royalty, and she changed her tune.) Most of the time, Grace will give his students what he calls “regular human names” like Abby, Carl, or Martin.
But the most coveted nicknames are ones named after Earthen creatures. When ♩♪♬ 🎵 ♩♪♬ 🎵 first introduced themselves, Friend Grace immediately perked up and shouted “Robin!” After a bit of explaining himself and a few videos of bird calls, Robin was trilling and chirping happily, excited at having a nickname that felt like a 1-to-1 translation of their own.
Even well after Friend Grace is gone, his legacy remains. A hundred years into the future, when humankind finally launches a new ship with the express purpose of properly meeting their Eridian neighbors, one of the first messages exchanged is “Hello! My name Robin.”
I am begging you. Please learn about stress/discomfort tolerance. Practice raising it. You need this to survive. If someone online can ruin your day with a throwaway comment, you desperately need to understand discomfort tolerance and consciously, systematically build that shit.
Also! Stress tolerance is such an important skill that having a learning disability in that area is a major symptom of a whole lot of other disabilities/mental illnesses! Struggling with it is a huge part of life! It sucks!
Am I saying everyone with misophonia needs to listen to chewing noises all day? No. But you need to find ways to tolerate it enough that you don't treat others like shit if they make a mouth noise near you.
No, you don't have to read the fic with your trigger tags. But you do need to be able to handle scrolling past the tags without being upset.
It is hard! But not having it also makes you so so so easy to manipulate. That grandma is racist AF because her mom raised her to be uncomfortable around black people and she never fought that discomfort. Trans people make so many cis people uncomfortable and that discomfort turns into bigotry real fast.
Letting your discomfort dictate your actions and beliefs about things is a great way to become a terrible person. Learn. Discomfort. Tolerance.
I'll say it again: other people do not owe you a perfectly curated experience of the world. Being a little uncomfortable sometimes is just the cost of like...existing in the world.
k but imagine Rocky wanting to learn about how humans became the apex predators of their planet so he has Grace “hunt” him in the biodome as an experiment and during it he thinks Grace isn’t trying or taking it seriously which is bad bad bad because this is for research purposes
only for Rocky to get more and more tired as the experiment goes on just to realize that Grace isn’t which makes him panic so he puts as much distance as he can between them and finds a (hopefully) safe spot to sleep and when he wakes up the human is crouching over him like “got youuu” and Rocky has never shrieked so damn loud before in his life
