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!
so the synopsis of The Ring is: you will die 7 days after watching this videotape. my question is does that apply to rewatching the tape. let's say I watch the tape, wait 6 days, and watch it again. does the timer reset to 7 days? can I do this indefinitely? can I become functionally immortal by watching the evil videotape on a weekly basis?
I require the film where someone decides this means they are functionally immortal for 6 days after watching the tape so seeks it out before going on a series of utterly batshit suicide missions. The tape keeps trying to do creepy crap around them and they're just like "I have 3 days 12 hours left to do this prison break so you're not even on my top 10 concerns, either distract this guard for me or go do something about that hair while you're waiting"
The ghost is so baffled and has no idea how to explain that's not how any of this works that it does save them a couple times while trying to get this across, thus convincing them the theory has been validated
sorry didn't realize the bridge has to be plain beige concrete. that was a load bearing plain beige concrete if anyone tags it the whole bridge collapses
There's a Chinese meme that the Yellow River doesn't need rituals to present sacrifices because if it's hungry it'll come onto the shore and eat the sacrifices itself.
#some netizens also say chinese people like unification because only a powerful unified dynasty can survive the yellow river and sometimes #also the chang jiang when they decide to flood and change directions and kill and displace millions #also only large dynasties have the resources to do hydroengineering to try and control the yellow river #yellow river be like: if you don't hydroengineer you die #but if you do you might also die heehee #“we call these our mother rivers not because they are gentle but because we are too scared” tags on above post
The Great Lakes are uncaring, don't care whether you live or die, ambivalent, pay no attention to you.
The Yellow River cares. Deeply. About you, specifically. And your death. And being the cause of it. It notices you and your intentions. You've been warned. Exercise your hubris accordingly.
A 75 yo man proudly came into the cafe wearing an Ultra Maga hat. I excused my barista from the register to handle the transaction.
"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."
"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"
"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"
"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."
"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"
I laughed. "I've heard that before."
"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."
I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"
Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.
There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.
Anyone wearing that type of shit and preying on workers for their own spank bank material is a brainless fucking sheep.
something i want to mention because i’ve seen it growing as a trend online is that not only do people do this just for their own gratification, but watch for glasses. smart glasses are a growing segment of the consumer market, and creeps like this are harassing people in public in order to gather content without the victims being aware they’re being filmed
☝️🤓 it’s because the further you move toward the earth’s poles, the lower the angle of the sun is at the hottest parts of the day, meaning the radiation hits your whole body, causing it to feel 10-20 degrees warmer than the thermometer reading will tell you. People from tropical climes, aka close to the equator, are used to the sun’s radiation hitting a much smaller target- their head and shoulders.
Also the further you move toward the poles the more pronounced the difference between the length of day and night is. Worst part of a far-north (or south) heatwave is it doesn’t get dark long enough for meaningful cooling.
i couldn't tell you if the sun is uniquely evil in europe, but i can tell you the bigger issue is that climate change has been advancing in the region at a pace that urban infrastructure has no chance in hell keeping up with, at least for the next 1-2 decades. in many big european cities the 'old town' area is probably a paved square surrounded by historical buildings, maybe a cathedral, a monument, a statue or two, a fountain if you're lucky. that was fine back when 30 degrees celsius was a rare heatwave. it's a fucking nightmare when 38 degrees has become commonplace, because what are you gonna do? move a bunch of historical buildings to make room for enough trees to make a difference, since large green spaces are also limited to parks and gardens? build artificial cooling infrastructure around a 15th century cathedral? i'm not being pretentious, i'm saying whatever methods we develop for mitigating the insane pace of climate change should take into account the importance of cultural sites everywhere, not just in europe. it's the kind of thing where you need historians, curators and artists on the team, not just engineers and climatologists.
it's also a problem in modern urban spaces here. in eastern europe, big concrete apartment buildings built during communism are a common site. great for affordable housing and the reason eastern europe has some of the highest home ownership rates in the world, but when it's 38 degrees out and you're walking on asphalt among literal giant slabs of concrete it's a nightmare.
i couldn't tell you about uv levels or the angle of the sun, but i can tell you europe is unprepared to deal with the current pace of climate change. if you're out in a european old town square like the guy in that screenshot and the thermometer says 30 degrees, it's a fucking lie. it's easily 40 degrees. you're not getting heatstroke because the sun is a deadly laser, but because you're in the middle of a very poorly controlled heat island (that you also might not have expected and prepared for if you came as a tourist). and i worry it's going to get worse before it gets better.
not many people know this but when talking about your multiple pronoun-using friend you build up a combo meter for every subsequent unique pronoun you use
Hi, these bees are babies! They’re not clumsy at all, this is what is called orientation flights. After birth and before beginning their careers as foragers (as all Honey bees cycle through all the jobs in the Hive throughout their lifespan), Honey bees take short flights back and forth, to and from the Hive, to orient themselves with their wings and their home so they can learn its location and how to get back home after foraging! Everyone has to learn, these are just smol little baby turkeys. Bees use the angle of the sun for location so adults have a better and more direct sense of location than any human
anytime somebody handles a rare book or manuscript without gloves in a piece of media, an archivist/historian/librarian gets their wings. and approximately one william people who have never interacted with a rare book or manuscript ever in their lives emerge from the woodwork to yell about gloves
straight friend groups will be like "the cheerleader" "the jock" "the nerd" "the theatre kid" "the loser"
queer friend groups will be like "queen bee" "the kindest boy alive" "senior year murderess" "cello player" "your tweed-wearing gay ex-boyfriend" "homoerotic hallucination" "the only teenage girl to unironically wear a chain of pearls" “girl so beautiful you must call her by her full government name”
the question of what cultural output an online community produces isn't a bad one, even if I get why people feel a bit nervous about touching that sort of thing. I just really don't think there's much you can produce that's more scathing than, in collective, producing nothing
which, to be clear, is pretty hard to do. not in the sense of "people who write fanfic aren't making anything" but in the sense of "there are some consumer communities so hostile to the idea of doing anything else that they refuse to do anything but buy things officially and discuss buying things officially"
Get Assassin x Demon King!!! @b0rtney - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
