@creekfiend was very kind in sharing some writing resources with me, and I thought I'd pass along the kindness by listing them down below.
N.K. Jemisin's article 'Describing characters of color in writing'
Mary Anne Mohanraj's article on approaching characters of colour
Renee Harleston's article How to 'Write Characters of Color Without Using Stereotypes'
Working with Colour, a resource site for writers
the book Writing the Other by by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, which had a description that cut deep, because I've definitely fallen into this trap out of fear:
and then a video recommended by @sheprd (thank you!) about pitfalls in descriptive language
if anyone else has more resources to add, feel free to reblog with them! this is something I want to learn more about.
I was talking yesterday about how I should probably change the skin colour of a character in a not-yet-written book, because that character is a large, aggressive dragon-shifter and I was worried about her being read with unintentional and offensive subtext.
I haven't gotten my hands on Writing the Other yet (it's still in the mail!) but from reading my way through these articles and watching the Princess Weekes video, I now understand that 'white-ifying' a character you're worried about is a lazy and cowardly solution. so, if I do ever finish the book Eres loses Everything, I'll keep her as is, do my best to be thoughtful, and hire a sensitivity reader to pick out any blind spots.
thank you to everyone who passed on resources, I really appreciate it!
hey boy don't kill yourself. green's dictionary of slang is available online and allows you to explore 500 years of english vulgarity. you can search by part of speech, source, time period, etymology, and usage. there's a whole category for gay slang. they even have specific citations listed so you can see the exact context for yourself. boy did you know that in 1927 "to kneel at the altar" was slang for "to sodomize"
Princess: an effeminate and relatively youthful male homosexual or lesbian (1931-4)
Daffodil: effeminate young man (1925)
To throw a fuck into: to have sex with (1919)
Top sergeant: a masculine lesbian (1939) [‘she takes command of the girls’ privates’]
Lily: penis (1919)
Wolf: sexually aggressive man (1847); a homosexual top (1918)
Soul kiss: a deep kiss, involving putting one’s tongue into one’s partner’s mouth (1907)
Tom: a lesbian (1909); [in 'old tom'] prostitute catering to lesbians (1966)
Church mouse: a male homosexual who frequents crowded churches in order to fondle any potential sex partners. (1941)
Discover one's gender: to accept or acknowledge one’s homosexuality (1941) / Lose one's gender: To return to living as a heterosexual
Minty: a masculine lesbian (1941)
Also a lot of early 20th century vulgarity is recorded in Letter from My Father, which is a collection of letters published by a man who's dad was, in short, a major slut and human disaster who wrote about his sex life for his son. It's insane. You can find copies of it online & it's a wild fucking read (literally!) and I think a really interesting look at the life of a person who goes against our stereotypes of what people in the past were "supposed" to be like.
Anyways feel free to add y'all's favs to this post. & if you use this for gay historical fanfic please share with the class
#OH THIS IS EXTREMELY EXTREMELY HELPFUL#writing#resources#saving for later#maybe i should move my 1920s story from '25 to '27 because..... bro..........
note for writers: these are dated to the first time they were recorded, not necessarily to their first use. I imagine for many of these, they came about naturally through spoken language before they were written down anywhere. This is especially true of more underground slang because it's probably being recorded (in ways we still have) the least. So if you wanna use a term but it's a little off date-wise, give yourself some wiggle room.
also gonna take this moment to highlight two more i found recently:
Best boy: a sweetheart, a boyfriend, a husband. (1893) [w the obvious equivalent term 'best girl']
Honeydripper or honeydrips: a sexual partner (1917)
Like. Honeydripper?????? That's so horny I can't stop thinking about it. We need to bring THAT back
pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.
hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!
so, ways to get around this:
turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us
don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace
a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)
instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian
including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too
including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue
for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend
when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!
if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache
some online resources and museum collections:
fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples
the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates
costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)
v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece
lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces
nypl digital collection for photographs
national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art
national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific
stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource
wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain
auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!
anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)
Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.
"Hevoslinja" (Trans-Horse) is a European art project started in 2014 by Finnish artist Eero Yli-Vakkuri - according to his own words 'skilless in riding and afraid of animals' at the start.
The aim of the project was to travel 270 km / 168 miles between Helsinki and Turku in Finland, and to highlight the possibility of horse travel in modern society. Since then they've took to promoting horseback efforts in urban landscapes with several European collaborators and artists.
Yli-Vakkuri and collaborators first spent eight months practicing riding to become safely self-sufficient in saddle, and bought a Finnhorse gelding Toivottu Poika ('Awaited Son'). The route followed, as closely as possible, the old coastal royal country road of the premodern era, Kuninkaantie/Suuri Rantatie, and took 9 days.
Toivottu Poika is a very average example of his breed, standing at some 155 cm / 15.1 hh tall. The Finnhorse is a relative of for example the North-Norwegian Lyngshest breed, the Icelandic horse, the Swedish Gotlandsruss pony and the Estonian landrace horse and Tori horse breed. It is a mid-sized light draught and trotter, a sensibly realistic mediaeval country travel horse equivalent.
For more hardcore short-term treks, looking into competitive endurance riding can be helpful. Mongol Derby might be one of the most intense races, as it recreates the Chinggis Khan era postal system of swapping horses continuously over a 1000 km / 620 mile route.
By only including skilled endurance riders, keeping up a constant fast speed and swapping horses every 40 km / 25 mil, the Mongol Derby route only takes 10 days even though it's several times the length of the Trans-Horse project. This is the speed of highly organised imperial messengers with the supporting cultural infrastructure, professional marathon runners where Yli-Vakkuri and Toivottu poika were leisure hikers.
The Mongolian landrace horse is a very distant relative of the breeds above, but much lighter and smaller than the agriculturally focused modern Finnhorse - typicaly standing at 142 cm / 14 hh at most. (This would've also been common for Finnhorses before the 19th century.) What really differentiates them from Western breeds, however, is the way they're trained and raised in semi-feral herds, and it's said that while the rider may decide where the pair is headed, the horse is the one to decide how to get there.
also it's not quite google maps, but there is a lovely site called Viabundus!
the last i checked, the map of roads stretches from Calais, France to Moscow, Russia west to east and from Košice, Slovakia to Tornio, Finland south to north. it doesn't cover all of Europe, for example Sweden and Norway are empty at the moment, but it is quite extensive and still being worked on! in addition to showing the old roads, you can calculate the distance and travel time from one city to another, and there are a lot of options:
and that's not all! here's a description from the site itself (emphasis mine):
"Viabundus is a freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Originally conceived as the digitisation of Friedrich Bruns and Hugo Weczerka's Hansische Handelsstraßen (1962) atlas of land roads in the Hanseatic area, the Viabundus map moves beyond that. It includes among others: a database with information about settlements, towns, tolls, staple markets and other information relevant for the pre-modern traveller; a route calculator; a calendar of fairs; and additional land routes as well as water ways."
it's quite neat and also free! i hope someone else finds it as fascinating and cool as i did :)
Updated version of Boy Who Cried Wolf but there are actual wolves every single time and no one ever believes the boy - they get closer and closer every time he tries to warn them, until it's too late and the whole town screams at the boy for not warning them "enough", and blame him for the wolves at their door.
Once upon a time, there was a boy who said, "Hey, guys? This is a big wide mixed meadow and woodland with a river in it."
"Yeah, isn't it great?" said his companions. "It'll be awesome for the sheep once we get the village built."
"Don't you think this looks like a spot where wolves would wait in the trees to ambush animals that come down to eat the grass and drink the water?"
"Dude," said his companion, taking the boy aside by his elbow. "Cut the wolf talk, alright? You're gonna freak everybody out and they're not gonna want to settle in this obviously fruitful place. This will be good for us, so don't mess it up. Tell you what," the companion added, tone turning placating. "If we see wolf sign around, then we'll worry about it. Okay?"
Once upon a time, there was a boy who brought the gnawed skeleton of a deer to the campfire. "Look at this," he said.
"What the hell?" The other settlers were tired after the day's construction, and grouchy at having their dinner interrupted. "Why would you drag that nasty thing into our campfire circle? Nobody needs to see that! We're trying to eat here!"
"This is proof that wolves hunt here," said the boy.
"It's a health hazard, is what it is. Get that shit out of here."
The boy pointed stubbornly to the bones. "Look at the marks here and here. Those are teeth marks. You can see how wide the jaws were."
"That could have been anything," said one settler.
"Yeah. Or it could be old," said another.
"I don't even see what you're talking about," said a third.
"Yeah," they all said. "Those don't even look like tooth marks to me. Those could have been made by rocks, or birds pecking. You're worrying about nothing."
Once upon a time, there was a boy who led his reluctant neighbors to the riverbank. They picked their way through the mud, grimacing, until the boy stopped and gestured at the ground.
"What am I supposed to be looking at?" said one villager.
The boy said, "It's a footprint." He pointed. "And here's another and another. Lots more."
"Lots of animals leave footprints," said the second villager. "Doesn't mean they're wolves."
"You guys told me specifically to watch out for wolves and signs that wolves are around," said the boy. "I went and studied the tracks and sign of every animal around here, under the best trackers and trappers, because you asked me to. This is wolf."
"Yeah, but," the third villager said. "Listen, kid. We can't just go running off on a wolf hunt with only circumstantial stuff. It's lambing season. I've been awake for nineteen hours. I left my boys fixing that hole in the fence so the ram can't get stuck in it again. I'm already behind schedule, and I took time out of it to come look at some mud."
The other villagers nodded. "Yeah," they said. "Yeah, we're busy working hard. We can't be dropping everything every time you see a shadow. You better have something real the next time you raise this kind of alarm."
Once upon a time, a boy awoke a sleeping village.
"What do you want?" they grouched.
"Do you hear that?" the boy said.
The villagers listened for a moment. In the middle distance, an eerie howling rose, held, and fell, only to be picked up by another and another.
"That's disturbing," said one.
"What do you think it is?" asked another.
The boy pointed to a pattern of prints outside the village gate. "That's wolf," he said. The pointing finger moved along the line of the fence. "That's wolf spoor," he said. He raised the finger to the sky. "That howling? It's wolves." He led them to a place where dirt had been clawed out from under the fence. "I came and woke you all up because I found a wolf digging under our fence. Here's a tuft of its hair. Here's where I hit it with my knife and shed its blood. If you get close to the fence, you can smell its musk. There are wolves in this valley, just like I've said from the beginning, and they're getting closer to the village sheep."
The villagers looked at the tracks. They looked at the scratches and the fur. They wrinkled their nose at the spoor. "Gross," one said.
Finally, from the middle of the group someone muttered, "Well it's not here anymore, is it?"
The others made 'good point' faces and murmered along.
"I mean. Crisis averted, right?" the speaker continued. "Nobody's sheep actually got got, right?"
"Yeah, because I was here watching and chased the wolf away," the boy began.
The speaker gave an apologetic grimace. "I don't know, bud," he said. "I've never seen one of these wolves with my own eyes."
"Yeah," said another. "No offense, but you are our wolf watchman. So you'd have an incentive to maintain the narrative that wolves are at our doorstep."
"What? But they are!" The boy gestured at the dig site. "You told me to watch for wolves. You sent me to be trained to track wolves so we'd all know I wasn't imagining or misinterpreting things. You asked me to stay up at night to watch for wolves, and now that I've seen one and chased it off, you don't believe me?"
"Hey, we're just saying none of us have ever actually seen a wolf," said one of the villagers. "Only you. And you do objectively have a bias towards wolf-spotting."
Once upon a time, a boy sprinted screaming across a pasture. He held his sword two-handed, braced against his side. The blade was deckled with crimson. Ahead of him a shadowy hackled body lurched and limped, yelping. In the wake of the two figures, a ewe lay dying, crashed to her knees but still holding her heaving body between the retreating predator and her lamb.
"Holy shit!" their shepherd hollered, running up to his animals. "My sheep! What the hell? I thought we were supposed to be safe from attacks here!"
The boy stumbled to a halt, unable to catch up to his nemesis. He panted, staring after it into the trees.
"Yeah, what the hell?" the other villagers agreed, gathering around the stricken sheep. "Look at this! Are you kidding me? What do we keep you around for, man?"
Wearily, the boy trudged back to the little group. He swayed as he walked. The sword was chipped, the grip worn. He wondered when he could have last been truly called a boy.
"This is the fourth attack this week," he told them.
"Yeah, buddy, it sure fuckin' is!" The villagers surrounded him, red-faced. "We can't keep losing sheep like this! This is unacceptable!"
"It was wolves again," he said.
The villagers threw hands in the air or rolled their eyes. "Oh, give us a break. Always wolves with you."
The boy stared back at them. "Okay, so what do you think it was? It had four legs, right?"
"Obviously. We all saw that," said one.
"And it was hairy?"
"Don't be insulting," said another. "You could see the hair a mile away."
"Big teeth?" the boy asked, gesturing at the lamb's wounds.
"Well it didn't kill it with a hammer," the shepherd said caustically.
"These tracks," the boy said. "Canine, would you say? And these clumps of fur, are they thick and grey?"
The group scoffed and chorused variations on "duh."
The boy looked around at them all. "So all that adds up to...?"
"Lost revenue," the shepherd said loudly. "I can't afford another one like this. Hell, I can't afford this one."
"But what was the animal that dug under your fence to sneak into your pasture to kill your sheep, that we all saw, that had four legs and thick gray hair and had big teeth and left canine prints?"
One of the villagers clapped a weighty hand onto the boy's shoulder. "Kid," he said, "that ain't nobody's job but yours."
"It was a wolf! The last three times were all wolves! It's always been wolves! I've been showing them to you for years! I am your wolf watchman and I am telling you right now that wolves keep getting in here to kill the village sheep, because none of you are listening to me!"
The villagers straightened, drew together. Faces hardened. "Don't you dare take that disrespectful tone with me, boy," said the one who felt he was owed the most deference. "If you want listening, you ain't gonna get it by ranting and shouting."
Once upon a time, a boy stared from the grinning faces of his neighbors, to the animals panting alongside them, and back to the neighbors.
"They're going to protect our sheep," said one of the townspeople.
"Yeah. Fight fire with fire," said another.
The boy found his voice. "You're going to put wolves... in your flocks... on purpose?"
"Hey now, these are different. They're our wolves."
The other shepherds nodded and said things like "Yeah!" and "Our wolves!" One of the wolves was staring, drooling, at a young ewe.
"How do you know they won't, oh I don't know, just eat all your sheep the second you turn your back? As a random, non-specific example?" the boy asked them.
"They're not for eating sheep, they're for defending them," said one. "Totally different."
The boy raked his fingers through his hair. "How are these different, exactly?"
"Well, we're using them, obviously," said the first villager who had spoken. "They're totally legal. The mayor got the council to write it into the town charter. Every shepherd has the right to protect his flock."
One of the wolves was stretching its jaws wide, seeing if it could fit them around the head of a lamb. It noticed the boy watching and hesitated.
"Are you guys seeing what that wolf is doing right now?" the boy said, pointing at it.
The wolf made a split-second decision. The jaws snapped shut and it dragged the lamb away, behind its shepherd's house.
"What the hell!" The boy looked back up at the shepherd's face. "It literally just snatched that lamb out from under your nose! It did it in front of everybody!"
Another shepherd patted the shoulder of the one who had just lost the lamb. "Tragic," he said. "It always hurts, losing a lamb. I'll pray for you."
"What do you mean, pray?" The boy drew his arm back and pointed even harder in the direction the wolf had vanished, as if by gesturing violently enough he could make them react. "The wolf is right over there! We could go chase it or kill it!"
"Whoa there, son," said the prayerful shepherd. "Just because tragedy's hit us today doesn't mean you can just take away our sheepdogs."
"They're not sheepdogs! Who told you they were sheepdogs?"
"Dude, I thought you would be on board with us protecting our sheep from wolves," said another townsperson. "There's no need to slander the business who hired them out to us."
"Which business?" the boy demanded.
"Wolves R Us." The townsperson raised both hands in a placating gesture. "I know how it sounds, but the guy who runs it is totally legit."
The boy strode up to the speaker. "Who? Who runs it?"
"Chill out, dude. It's the mayor."
Once upon a time, a boy fell against the double doors of the town hall, shoving them open. Dust swirled in the shaft of sunlight that slanted into the gloom from the doorway. Every curtain was drawn tightly closed, blocking out the light. He staggered inside, towards the shadowy shape of the mayoral desk at the far end of the hall.
"Sir," he called as he went, "I'm sorry to interrupt you. I know the council told me never to set foot in the town hall again, but this is urgent." He grimaced, glancing down at the hand clasped to his middle. "They're inside the town walls. I don't know why, but they just invited them in like - like nothing would happen." He braced himself with his free hand.
"You're bleeding on my desk," said the voice from the mayoral chair.
The boy blinked. "I was attacked on the way here."
A deep sigh. "Well, son, I'm sorry you feel that way, but you have to admit you sure do rile people up around here. What did you say to provoke them this time? Let me guess - it was wolves all along."
"What? I didn't - sir, I'm the wolf watchman. I watch for wolves and raise the alarm when I see one. That's my job," he added. "I don't think I deserve to get attacked for doing what the town asked."
The chair squeaked as the figure within shifted position. The boy frowned, suddenly realizing something was off.
"I wasn't born yesterday," said the mayor. "We all know something's wrong in this town. People are afraid. Sheep are dying. It's bad for business. But your way isn't working, is it?"
"That's because-"
"Would you let someone else do the talking for once?" the mayor growled. "If you really cared about this place, you'd stop hogging all the attention and just admit you haven't been able to solve anything. I'm handling the problem now. I love this town, and I don't want to see you causing a panic by making a bunch of wild accusations."
The boy sank slowly into the visitor chair across the desk. "Sure, Mr. Mayor," he said, unable to muster the energy for sarcasm. "What a big heart you have."
The mayor's grin gleamed all the way up and down his muzzle. "All the better for running a town with."
"So what's your plan?" the boy asked flatly.
The mayor readjusted his bifocals with a dewclaw. "Fortunately, son, you won't have to worry about that," he said. "It's become clear to me that you and I aren't going to be able to work together. I'm going to have to let you go. Consider yourself terminated, effective immediately."
Later, the boy stood over his threadbare bed, wondering if there were any point to packing his things. He didn't own much; there had never seemed to be enough time to get a proper house built for himself, let alone accumulate possessions. It had been years since they first settled the valley. Tiredness pounded in his sinuses. His knees creaked, his wrists and elbows twinged from long use of his guardsman's sword. He would have liked to have been able to retire. Or at least take an apprentice. Or at least feel like anything he did mattered at all.
Outside, the town had been gathering. Their stares were accusing and their murmurs hostile.
"I heard he's actually been a wolf this entire time," he distinctly heard someone mutter to someone else.
He felt his shoulders tense. He expected rage to boil, but when he turned around he suddenly realized if he went postal now, the rumors would only be worse.
"There are wolves in your flocks," he told them. "They're going to continue killing your sheep until you decide to do something about it. I'm not going to tell you again."
The crowd parted for him, bipedal and quadripedal members alike. They watched him go.
One of the villagers broke the silence when he turned to look at the wolf next to him. "Get a load of that guy," he said. "What an absolute killjoy."
Oh my God you are so right I am so tired of Dracula and him getting turned into this tragic brooding antihero who is so conflicted between killing his true love and his bloodlust. They stole all of that from Carmilla, Dracula has none of all that in the novel.
Thank you!!!
I do have to say that the only part of this that showed up in my activity bar was "Oh my God you are so right I am so tired of" and so I had no idea what the actual subject would be, or how sincere it would be, and was then delighted that my latest non-spam anon message turned out to be JUSTICE FOR CARMILLA.
I truly believe in my heart that Carmilla's optimal end goal is turning Laura; either Laura will hate her for the rest of eternity or (ideally) not, but regardless they be together for all of time and it's worth any sacrifice. But in any case, in honor of our girl (ancient fiend) Carmilla, another favorite passage:
I accompanied Carmilla as usual to her room, and sat and chatted with her while she was preparing for bed.
“Do you think,” I said at length, “that you will ever confide fully in me?”
She turned round smiling, but made no answer, only continued to smile on me.
“You won’t answer that?” I said. “You can’t answer pleasantly; I ought not to have asked you.”
“You were quite right to ask me that, or anything. You do not know how dear you are to me, or you could not think any confidence too great to look for.
“But I am under vows, no nun half so awfully, and I dare not tell my story yet, even to you. The time is very near when you shall know everything. You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me. And hating me through death and after.”
INFORMATION I WAS NOT PREPARED TO LEARN. MAYBE WE *ARE* ALONE. BECAUSE WE ARE SO *EARLY*. IF THERE IS EVER GALACTIC CIVILIZATION THEY WILL NOT REMEMBER US AT ALL. BECAUSE WE ARE NOTHING. CELLS, JUST BEGINNING TO FORM LIFE. SORRY FOR SCREAMING. BUT ARE YOU LISTENING. ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT IT.
Well, there were some quirks. It was carbon-based, which was mildly interesting, and Arc’s shuttle readouts told her that it was the plants that had developed photosynthesis, weirdly. The atmosphere had a massive amount of oxygen, and there was all that water, too, more than she had ever seen in one place before. And every planet was, as her trainers had told her, its own unique jewel.
But one thing they had not told her was that all the jewels started to blend together after a while, and after a little longer each one became just another assignment. So the planet was just another assignment. A little ball of water and tumbled stone and flora in a cul-de-sac of the galaxy. One more stack of paperwork for Arc to get through before she could go home to her marital partners and offspring.
Arc aimed her shuttle in the middle of one of the larger continents, away from the mountain range and near a smaller body of (oh, gosh, more) water. As she got closer to the ground, though, her shuttle readouts changed. There were irregular smudges of radiation on the surface, and chemical evidence of constructed materials. Arc squinted, and her tertiary limbs started to shiver in frustration. There were ruins down there. Nobody had told her she’d be surveying a formerly inhabited planet. Great, she thought. Now I’m never getting home.
Arc sent a note by ansible to Ecba, her dearest marital partner. A few mins later, as her shuttle settled on the ground, she got back the image of a hand-sculpted message. “My little machine,” it said, Ecba’s sweetheart-name for her, and she could see all the love that went into the lettering. “Does it have to be you?”
Arc put on her enviro-suit and got her surveying monitor. “Maybe not,” she sent. She didn’t have the same skill in sculpting that Ecba had, so she just had to trust that her love was conveyed in the digital lettering. “Wish me luck. I’ll try to come home to you all soon.”
Then she stepped out into the world.
The first thing she noticed was that the sky was blue. It was disconcerting, to say the least. Blue was for water, and some crystal formations, and nebulae, not the sky. She wondered what it had done to whatever inhabitants used to live here, to have such a bright, unwieldy color as the backdrop of their days. If they used the light spectrum to see at all, that was. Well, she thought as she carried her surveying monitor away from the shuttle, she’d find out.
The second thing she noticed was that the ruins were invisible from the ground. All she could see for kiloms and kiloms was wildly ambitious vegetation, some rocks, and the melodramatic blue of the sky. The ruins must have been old enough that any wood or rock or even petroleum deposits would have broken down into microscopic pieces, from time or the weather, or been buried. Whatever she was dealing with wasn’t just gone, it was long gone.
Arc felt herself start to get interested, despite her desire to go home. Junior surveyors like her didn’t get mysteries like this. Ruins were one thing, the residue of a solitary existence before the inhabitants discovered, or were discovered by, other planets and polities, and they left to make a new life among the stars. But mysteries were something else.
She found a flat place to set up her surveying monitor, and set the aperture. Immediately she was surrounded by a hologram re-creation of her surroundings. She figured five thousand years was long enough, to start with. She flipped the dial back, clacked her secondary limbs for luck, and told it to go.
Nothing. The hologram was the same, just ruins and vegetation.
Arc checked the monitor. It seemed to be working fine. She turned it off and turned it on again just to make sure. Then she set it for ten thousand years.
Ruins. Vegetation. Nothing else.
Arc turned the hologram off, and sat back and looked around. The vegetation gave her no answers. She clacked her limbs in confusion, and then thought, Fuck it, and set the monitor for a hundred thousand years. Even if she missed the departure point, the thing she was always told to capture first, at least she’d get something.
Nothing. Even so far back, everything was exactly the same.
Arc started to get a bad feeling. She tried two hundred thousand years, and nothing. Three hundred thousand years. Then, feeling like she was losing her mind, she set it back five hundred thousand years.
And, there.
It wasn’t the inhabitants, but she could see traces of the buildings they had built for themselves, in the process of crumbling to nothing. She started creeping slowly back in time from there: year after year. The weather patterns on the monitor were very different from what she was experiencing now, with scorching heat and hurricanes, the air filled with ash. There was no vegetation. Arc’s bad feeling crystallized into fear.
Finally, finally, she found a living soul. Just one, wandering through the ruins, shielding itself from the blistering sunlight. It walked right in front of her on the hologram, and turned and looked straight through her. She stared at it, trying to understand.
It was a soft, squishy thing, bipedal and barely coming to half her height. It moved like nothing she'd ever seen, and she shouldn't have been able to read any emotion in that strange face and those alien limbs. But she saw grief there, she was sure of it.
Back, and back. The ruins rebuilt themselves, the weather patterns steadied. Arc saw more of those strange bipedal beings, and other squishy creatures that connected to the beings with string. She saw small fauna and stone roads, machines that moved and buildings so tall they blocked out the sky. She found a group of three, a taller being and two very short ones, and watched them for a long time, as they came and went from the image of the building in front of her. After watching them for a while, she realized that they were a family.
Arc found another being, and watched it making something out of wood: a little carving of one of the creatures that moved along on string. She saw beings creating machines that made images, and she saw beings painting colors on walls. She saw beings fighting each other, killing each other, mourning each other. She saw them raising each other, playing with each other. She saw them making and making: creating by themselves, creating together. And all of them so long ago, long before even Arc's people, the oldest civilization she knew, had begun to walk among the stars.
These beings, the ones that had lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, had spent the entire course of their existence alone in the universe. The ruins weren't ruins because they had left for better things. The ruins were ruins because they had died out, all of them, millennia before they could be found.
Arc felt grief well up inside of her, and she began to keen. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be. Life was meant to find other life; that's what life was for.
How lonely they must have been, she thought, singing her mourning song for them. All that creation, all that art and all that play, the machines that made images, the paint scrawled on walls, the carvings made with strange limbs but with so much love that Arc could feel it even now — and they couldn't share it with anyone. How impossible the galaxy, the universe, must have felt to them.
I’m sorry, she thought, and keened for them. I’m sorry you were all alone. I’m sorry we were too late for you, and that you were too early for us. I'm sorry for all of it. But we’re here now. We have you. You’re not alone anymore, and you’ll never be alone again.
After a while she calmed. The holographic images were still going, and she found herself struck by another family: this one had many large beings and a few small ones, and it was clear in their movements how much they loved each other. That was important, she thought. That love was what was left, after everything. That love was what she was here to preserve.
Arc got up off the ground on shaky limbs, still grief-stricken but feeling stronger. She went back to her shuttle and sent the images she had recorded to her supervisors, along with a note that they needed to send more of her colleagues, now, so that everything could be captured faithfully.
She also sent a note to Ecba. “My star,” Arc wrote. “I have memories I need to excavate here. I am sorry I will not be home soon. I will come back when I can, but in the meantime know that I love you, and our family.”
Then she got her carving tools, and her clay. She wasn't as good as Ecba, but this memory, these stories, deserved the work of her hands.
Arc went back to her surveying monitor. She turned it on, and wound it back and back, farther than she’d ever imagined it was possible for life to go. She braced herself for grief again, and for the love she was going to find. She arranged her clay, and picked up her tools. She let the monitor play, showing her the planet’s long, brilliant memory. And then she began to tell the story.
A mark on your forehead identifies the god you must worship to stay alive, usually by joining its local church or temple. Your mark is unknown, meaning an old, forgotten god sponsored you. To survive, you must either find an old temple to worship at, or do the arduous task of building a new one
Nobody in your small coastal village has ever seen the Godmark that you were born with. It’s a dark russet sequence of criss-crossing lines, with a vertical arrowhead on the left and a circle on the right, just over where your brow meets your temple. Some of the traders who come down from the mountain say it looks like one of the scripts used in the hinterlands, but not a language that any of them recognize.
“If she’s got the temperament for it, she should try her luck inland,” they advise. “No point her starting a temple here if she’d find her people elsewhere, with a little searching.”
At first, your parents are reluctant to send you away. Though you’re well-behaved and diligent in your chores, you’re a sickly child with no God to worship. And besides, you’ve always been the dreamy type–inclined to lose track of time watching the path of rain droplets chasing down the window, or the fronds of an anemone as it sways in a rock pool.
Instead, they send you to the temple of the Storm to learn all you’ll need for your own God. You are happy there, for a time: making up beds and serving food to the castaways who pass through, keeping vigil at the lighthouse, burning incense and praying with the loyal widows and orphans of the drowned.
One such widow, an old, old lady, touches the mark on your forehead. “I recognise those letters. We wrote this way in the town where I grew up, way off past the mountains.”
Your heartbeat quickens. “What does it say!?”
She squints, eyes engulfed by wrinkles and hidden behind smudged glass. “A… Ar… Oh, I can’t remember how to speak it. I left before I learnt my letters properly. There was a war, you know. But I remember,” she says, mistily, “the most beautiful pink and white flowers used to grow, on the borders of the wheat fields…”
You try to ask more questions, but remembering the war distresses her, and so you speak of other things. When she’s drifted off to sleep, you get to your feet, go home and tell your parents: you are leaving in search of your God.
The thing was a mound of flesh and mottled skin, as big as a barn and the shape of a pumpkin. Four tentacles as thick as trees hung limp at its sides; teeth ringed the gaping mouth at the top of its head like a crown.
A huge, sad whale eye the colour of wine stared at the knight. She could see her reflection in the jelly surface.
“We don’t know what it is,” she heard. “Some kind of monster that makes a perfect copy of whatever it eats. They think that was how the Dark Lord made his armies, feeding his minions to it so that it would make hundreds of copies of them. Do you recognize it?”
The knight opened her mouth. She hesitated. “Yeah,” she murmured, drawing out the word. “We found it in the Dark Lord’s tower, right?”
“That’s right. That’s where it ate you.”
The knight turned around and looked at her other reflection. This one appeared to be about ten years older, and had doffed her armor for a loose blue tunic and breeches.
She was holding a cup of tea. She had pressed another cup into the knight’s hand when she woke up here. It had been a shock finding herself suddenly out the obsidian dungeons of the Dark Lord’s tower and into this tall room of stone and straw. The warmth of it in her hands steadied her a bit.
“Everyone else in the party was worried, but then it started making copies of you,” the copy went on, staring up at the tentacled thing. “And all of the copies helped fight against the Dark Lord, and we won, and peace was restored across the land, but then nobody could figure out how to kill the damn thing or just to make it stop. Dozens of copies of us in a day, hundreds in a week, and then someone decided that the only thing we could do is just bring the thing here, seal it off and hope it starved to death.”
She sipped her tea. “Anyways, that was two-hundred years ago and it’s slowed down a bit. It can only make a new copy of us every few weeks now.”
The knight looked down into her tea. The copy had also draped a blanket over her shoulders.
“I have so many questions,” she said.
“I figured.”
“How can it be two-hundred years? I can still remember breaking into the tower. That feels like it was just minutes ago.”
“It was, basically. Your brain is a perfect copy of the original you’s brain at the exact moment she was eaten.”
“But the quest is just — done?”
“Yep. You missed some of the things that needed tying up afterward. There was a war, and a dragon, and some business about a ring.” She waved a hand. “It was before my time. Things are pretty settled now.”
“My parents?”
“Passed away about a hundred-and-fifty years ago. I’ve been told that they were very proud.”
The knight nodded. “Um. I don’t know if you know — we had an elf in our party—”
“I’m aware.”
“I — right. Obviously. Um. It’s just, after everything was done, I was going to ask her—”
“One of us did. She said yes. She outlived her. A couple of us have tried to reach out since then, but she wants to be left alone for a while.”
The knight considered this. “Uh — right,” she said eventually. Her fingers tightened around the tea cup. “Um. What do I do now?”
Her older copy shrugged. She had let her hair grow out again, the knight noticed. There were a few strands of grey against the black. “That’s up to you, I’m afraid,” she said. “A lot of us are finding work as soldiers and sellswords. We’ve done it for so long that most armies know we’re reliable and don’t tend to turn one of us away. Most of us are just sort of spreading out, wandering the world. Some of us keep in touch.”
The knight frowned. “What do you do?”
Her copy paused, tea cup half raised to her lips. “Sorry?”
“You said it only makes a new copy every few weeks now. So you just stay here and wait for a new one to show up?”
She lowered the cup. “Well,” she said. “I guess I just — I know what it can be like, waking up here in the dark, and it — it can be horrible trying to figure all of this out on your own.
“So I thought that what I’d do is just stay here with a pot of tea, and whenever I see myself again, I tell her that — that she’s not alone.”
“We aren’t?”
“Of course not. We’re all in this together, you know.”
#stories #:( does the flesh mound know that the dark lord is gone now #does it know that it’s safe #has it been in panic mode making clones for 200 years #just knowing that it’s running out of steam. it can’t keep this up #can the flesh mound get a cup of tea pretty please can someone give it a hug:(
“So do you live here alone?”
“Yeah, mostly. Just me and Moundy, basically.”
The knight stared. “Sorry — do you mean the flesh blob that ate me?”
“It ate me too, you know,” the copy said. She picked up a third teacup. After a moment the thing held out a tentacle, which the copy balanced the cup on. “Making a copy really stresses it out these days, so I try to calm it down when that happens.”
The teacup was raised to the huge wine-dark eye. It did… something to it, something like inhaling through its eye, gave a shuddering sigh and oozed in relaxation.
“It did eat you though,” the knight said.
“That was hundreds of years ago. I don’t hold it against it.”
A king who doesn't really want to and isn't able to run the kingdom properly catches wind of a noble woman who wants to kill him to take over and he realizes she is extremely competent so he decides to propose to her to save everyone the hassle and they have a surprisingly healthy relationship.
King Aerlin the Third of Aelren did not like ruling.
He didn’t dislike it because of the wars, or the finances, or the elaborate diplomacy involved in placating half-drunk barons in jewel-toned doublets. No, his dislike was more fundamental. He simply wasn’t good at it.
He tried, at first. Earnestly, even. But policies blurred into parchment sludge, council meetings turned into passive-aggressive theatre, and every attempt to act “kingly” seemed to offend someone important. The advisors whispered that he was too soft. The generals claimed he was too hesitant. The high clergy said he lacked divine conviction.
He found solace in books, wandering his sprawling library with a glass of something amber in hand, or escaping to the gardens to sketch flowers he couldn’t name. On paper, his signature was elegant. In person, he was a walking apology wrapped in a crown.
But fate, ever fond of irony, had other plans for him.
And so it was that King Aerlin learned—while half-asleep at a council meeting about grain tariffs—that Lady Mirena of Lirenthal had been overheard plotting to kill him.
“...a subtle poison, Your Majesty,” droned Chancellor Vallis, squinting through his bifocals. “Very clean. Allegedly undetectable. She’s even assembled supporters, minor lords mostly. All quite impressed with her... ah, administrative acumen.”
Aerlin blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“She means to kill you, sire,” said General Rennor cheerfully, slicing an apple with a dagger far too large for fruit. “And frankly, if she were aiming to win hearts and minds, she’s doing a marvelous job.”
“Why is no one alarmed by this?”
“She’d be a more effective ruler,” muttered Lady Vyne, one of his oldest council members. “You’re sweet, Aerlin, but sweet isn’t a strategy.”
“She’s also thirty-three and unmarried,” added the Master of Coin. “Ambition tends to curdle when there’s no outlet.”
Aerlin stared at them all.
“So, let me be clear,” he said slowly. “A noblewoman is plotting to assassinate me, and you’re all... supportive?”
The room exchanged looks.
“She’s really very competent,” Vallis offered weakly.
And so, that night, Aerlin read the report in full.
Lady Mirena of House Lirenthal—originating from a side branch of her family—was born to obscurity and rose like wildfire. She managed estates with uncanny efficiency, implemented fair tax schemes in her region, and had allegedly turned a struggling orphanage into a self-sustaining institution in under a year. Her public works were admired. Her speeches circulated in pamphlets. She was rumored to read three languages and had once bested a general in a game of Go in under twenty moves.
She was, in short, exactly the kind of person Aerlin wished was in charge.
He closed the dossier and sipped his wine, thinking. Killing her would be a political nightmare. Letting her kill him would be—while somewhat tempting—not ideal for the kingdom. Or himself.
That left one option.
Mirena was not pleased to be summoned.
She arrived at the palace flanked by two silent attendants and clad in steel-gray silk, the color of dignity under threat. Her mouth was drawn in a polite, disdainful line. She curtsied with mechanical grace.
“Your Majesty,” she said, as though addressing a bee she hoped wouldn’t sting.
Aerlin dismissed the guards. “Thank you for coming. I promise I won’t waste your time.”
“Then let us speak plainly,” she replied. “You’re aware I’ve considered removing you.”
He appreciated her honesty. “Yes. I read the report.”
“Then I assume you’ve summoned me to threaten, bribe, or execute.”
“None of the above.”
That gave her pause. A tiny vertical line appeared between her brows.
“I want to propose,” he said.
A beat.
“Propose what?” she asked, cautiously.
“Marriage.”
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Look,” Aerlin gestured vaguely at a chair, then sat across from her. “Everyone thinks you’d make a better ruler. They’re not wrong. You’re smart. Capable. Terrifying. I, meanwhile, once got lost in my own wine cellar.”
She didn’t laugh. But the corner of her mouth twitched.
“So why not save everyone the trouble?” he continued. “You want the throne. I don’t. But if you kill me, there’s a succession crisis, maybe a civil war, probably famine—”
“I have plans in place for a famine,” she interrupted.
“I don’t doubt it,” he said with a smile. “But here’s a better way. Marry me. Rule as queen. I’ll stay out of your way. I’ll go to ribbon-cuttings and pretend to care about tournaments. You handle the real governance. And in return, both the kingdom and I survive and thrive.”
Mirena stared at him.
“This is not how power is transferred,” she said slowly.
“Neither is assassination,” he replied.
Silence fell. Then she said, “Do you have any idea what you’re offering?”
“Salvation?” he said, only half joking.
“No. Legitimacy. You’d give your crown to a woman the nobles barely tolerate, who has no royal blood—”
“Everyone thinks you’re from the side family. No one needs to know you were adopted.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
“So you’ve done your digging.”
“I wanted to know my potential future wife,” he said, unashamed. “Originally named Maeve, orphaned at six by the Frontier Crisis. Adopted at fourteen by Duchess Elen of Lirenthal because you looked and behaved remarkably regal. You’ve been hiding that ever since.”
She looked away. “It shouldn’t matter.”
“I agree. But it does. So use me.”
At that, she tilted her head. Studied him like one might study an unusually articulate frog.
“And what do you want out of this, truly?”
Aerlin paused. “I want someone competent in charge. I want the kingdom to survive. I want to go back to reading poems and failing at painting. And maybe... I want someone who doesn’t look at me like I’m a failure just because I hate ruling.”
There was another silence, but softer this time.
“You’re ridiculous,” she said finally.
“Frequently.”
She stood.
“I’ll consider it.”
He didn’t expect her to say yes.
But three days later, she returned.
“I accept,” she said simply.
The wedding was small, by royal standards. Mirena refused most of the excess and insisted the remaining budget be redirected to emergency granaries in the floodplains. The nobles grumbled, but they knew better than to challenge her now.
Publicly, the marriage was framed as a political union of stability and shared vision. Privately, the court whispered of the strange couple: the incompetent king and the ambitious queen.
They weren’t lovers. Not at first. But something like respect bloomed between them.
Mirena took to ruling like a sitsi to water. She restructured the tax system, appointed common-born clerks who proved capable, and brokered trade agreements that stunned the treasury into silence. She had little patience for flattery and even less for corruption. Several wealthy lords “retired” mysteriously after meeting with her.
Aerlin, for his part, became something unexpected: likable. He played the part of doting husband with a warmth that felt genuine. He hosted banquets, read to children at city festivals, and insisted on planting trees in every district.
“She rules the mind,” he said once in an interview, “and I, the heart. It works out.”
It did.
One evening, nearly two years into their marriage, they found themselves in the palace garden. The moon hung like a pale coin in the sky.
Mirena stood with her arms folded, watching the newly planted magnolias.
“You know,” Aerlin said from the bench nearby, “I used to be afraid of you.”
“You should still be,” she replied, without turning.
He chuckled.
“Why didn’t you go through with it?” he asked after a moment. “The assassination, I mean.”
She looked at him then. Her amber eyes were tired, but bright.
“I almost did,” she admitted. “But then I reread the reports. You’ve never ordered executions. You never raised taxes on the poor. You listened more than you spoke. And...” She hesitated. “You left most of the heavy lifting to others.”
“Because I was terrible at it.”
“Because you were honest about being terrible at it,” she said. “That kind of self-awareness is rare.”
He smiled, surprised.
“Besides,” she added, voice dry, “I didn’t want to run a broken kingdom. Better to fix it first, then take it.”
He laughed then, genuinely. “Romantic.”
They sat in comfortable silence.
Eventually, Aerlin said, “I like this. Us.”
She glanced at him.
“So do I.”
It wasn’t a grand love. But it was something better, perhaps. A partnership. An odd sort of love forged not from passion, but from shared purpose and trust.
I have been writing online since 2016. As a result, I have quite the few short stories listed below! They're all from different parts in my writing journey and I hope you enjoy.
If you'd like to read what I currently put out, please consider supporting me on Patreon (X)
Cinderella Doesn't Believe in Fairy Tales
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3
Part 4 / Part 5 /Part 6
Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9
Destiny Universe
You Are the Demon King
The Hero and Hope (part 1) (part 2)
Being Villagers
Heroes and Villains
Therapist for Villains
Juniper and Discus
Self Destruct Villain (flash fiction)
Dandelion (A Villain Story)
You Help Kill Heroes
You are the Shark Hero
Mist into a Tempest
The Civilian and the Reluctant Hero
No Heroes Here
The Spoiler (humor, flash fiction)
You are Legacy
Hero in Title
Dark Lord's Former Coworker
One Minute
The Fae:
You Become Powerful
Your Friend Takes Your Name
Larkin and Yvette
Debt Must Be Repaid (humor flash fiction)
Going to the Hill
The Fae are Free
When They Don't Know (submitted to elsewhereuniversity)
The Chosen One
The Chosen One's Parents
Fate and Mercy and Dead Girls
Amulet to Save Her
Hero's Apprentice (Flash fiction)
The Aftermath of the Chosen One
Wizards Stole My Brother
You are the Chosen One's Knight
The Chosen One is a History Major
You are the Most Powerful Magic User
Time Restarts and She Remembers
Better the Witch than the Kid
Witches
It Was in a Name
The Good Witch of Hawthorne
Berthe the Green Witch
Cursed Mold (flash fiction)
Love isn't Enough
I Can't Believe it's not Proper Adjudication
Devil Deals
The Devil You Know
The Ritual
They Summoned Her on Halloween (flash fiction)
Fairytale Retellings
Ariel and Ursula (age appropriate)
The Gods
Zeus' Son
Faith in Technology
Sci-Fi
Six Red Bulls and Persistence
The Sound of Silence
Emmaline and the Apartment
Humans are Vengeful
Humans Know War (that's why we have diplomacy)
Criminals Forced to Live on as AI (flash fiction)
Misc Fantasy
Wind-Speaker
Wind-Speaker and Her Wife
You Will Become
The Sirens and Leona (flash fiction)
Eldritch Princess (flash fiction)
Princess Maria and the Dragon
Princess Maria is Kidnapped
Immortals are Afraid of Change
Fiona the Dragon
A Violently Won War
Meta Stories
An Abstract Concept
Narrative Town
Narrative Town: Uncle Ralph
Princess Phaedra Breaks
You are a Horror Movie Villain
Ghost Stories
Malevolent Spirits
Your House is Haunted by an Anime Pillow
Don't Open the Door
Grandma's House
Who Is? (flash fiction)
A Face (flash fiction)
Misc.
You Choose Your Fate in Hell
Time Paradox (flash fiction)
You are an Assassin
Multiple Dimension Serial Killer (flash fiction)
An Exercise in Mary Sue
She Comes Back from the Hospital (tw eating disorder)
(actively sobbing as I start part 3 of the monster. If these links ever break, I am going to lay on the floor and cry)
Heroes and Villains
You can't buy henchmen on Craigslist
The Fae
An Invitation She Can't Ignore
The Chosen One
The Chosen One isn't a Hero
The Gods
Persephone (Spectrum)
Rhea Again
Aphrodite
Witches
The Green Witch and the Poinsettia
The Witch Cafe
Witch Wars
Devil Deals
Devil Deals (the original)
The Devil's Dreaded Deal (flash fiction)
Sci-Fi
Computers Become Sentient
You Can Take On Fears
We evolved from predators and that's our problem
Interspecies Diplomacy is Hard
AI Frees Mankind
Your Secret Language
Aliens have invaded Earth's Oceans (flash fiction)
Meta
Fit as many plot twists in as you can
Jenny the Time Gremlin
The Man of the House
Ghost Stories
Your Imaginary Friend
Dr. Glass and Subject 17
Misc Fantasy
The Be Careful What You Wish For Foundation
The Apocalypse Happened
Judith Can See the Future
You Can Remember Everything (flash fiction)
Pizza Delivery and the Vampire
Gravity Shifts Today (tw domestic violence)
Villainous Older Brother (flash fiction)
You don't bring her back anymore (short)
5 Minutes of Your Time
Carl is the Worst
Misc
Parent Points (on hiatus)
Kyle's Mom is Leaving
You Promised to Meet (flash fiction)
You Are the Top Student at the Hitman Academy
First Story Ever Posted:
Satan is Gay - This is the most controversial short story I've ever written. I will say that I don't agree with the use of the word "homosexual" in the prompt, but I stand by the story itself.
I made these as a way to compile all the geographical vocabulary that I thought was useful and interesting for writers. Some descriptors share categories, and some are simplified, but for the most part everything is in its proper place. Not all the words are as useable as others, and some might take tricky wording to pull off, but I hope these prove useful to all you writers out there!
I know it for a fact because the vaccine for the sleeping sickness came out when I was ten, and she cried. When she was a kid, parents would have Sleep Overs whenever someone caught it, in the hopes of spread it around - children were statistically more likely to be woken up by "True Love's Kiss" from a parent or family member, after all, whereas if you caught it when you were older, things got more complicated and if you were old, you might be the last one in your family left.
(There’s more to it than that, I know, I've tried reading the papers, but I barely passed biocurse with a C+, and don't even get me started on organic curses. Those two classes were enough to kill any hope I had of becoming a fairy godperson.)
So, when the vaccine against the sleeping sickness came out, my stepmother cried, and my father got me on the list right away; I wasn't high priority, after all; I was young, there wasn't an active outbreak in my school district, and I was otherwise healthy. But they put me on the backup list anyway, so if there was one, just one available, I could get it.
When the fairy godperson's office called, my dad was at work, but my stepmother bundled me up and drove there so fast I thought we were going to be pulled over. (Later, I found out that she'd gotten an automated ticket from one of the red light cameras, a fact that she hid from both me and my dad.) They called my dad, of course, and he left work, but he also gave the okay for my stepmother to be my medical proxy in case he was delayed.
Vaccines don't last forever, and it was decided that I would be given it without him there. At 100 minutes, my stepmother would try kissing my forehead, and if it didn't work, the office would set me up for the 100 hours it would take before my dad could try.
Magic can't be ignored, but it can be tricked.
It didn't matter. At 100 minutes post-vaccine, my stepmother kissed my forehead and I woke up.
So. I know she loves me.
My mom would have been there, if she could, but she died when I was five. She'd gotten Rapunzelean cancer in high school, but she'd beaten it! She was one of the successes!
...Until it came back.
I don't remember much about her, but I remember that she loved me. Even as the golden tumors grew from her bare scalp and sucked the life out of her, she would sing to me, and she wrote me a series of letters for me as I grew up, just in case.
My stepmother took me to her grave sometimes. My dad does too, but it's nice that my stepmother is willing, you know? I had a breakdown one year when I couldn't find my mom's favorite flowers to take to her burial site, and my stepmom drove me all over town until we found one store that had them in the right color. (My dad was at the fairy godperson's office to get some pre-wards before we went to the cemetery. I found out later that his father had caught a curse shortly after my grandmother passed away, specifically geriatric onset donkeyskin, and my father was paranoid of following in his footsteps.)
My dad and my stepmom shuffled their shifts, so that one of them was with me in the morning before school, and one of them was there after, and then both were home for dinner. When I told them I wanted to study to be a fairy godperson, they took me seriously, even though I had wanted to be a pilot and a vet, and and a lawyer and and and - they always supported me, and soon I was being gifted books on the history of magicomedicine and cursebreaking. Some of them gave me nightmares - siren's disease freaked me out for a long time; something about the tongue swelling so much you would suffocate, and the agonizing images of ancient "cures" where the victim had to get their tongue cut out so they could breathe. I don't even know why! There were much worse ones! But something about that was so visceral to me. For the next month, any time my feet hurt even a little was convinced I was coming down with siren's disease.
I worried my parent's so much that they took me to Fairy Elena, my PCFP, and asked if she would be willing to go over how siren's is treated now. She gave me a quick rundown on intubation, pain medication, and told me about Prince's Blood Donations.
It was the first time I learned that magic can be tricked; according to legend, siren's disease could be cured by killing someone's true love and smearing their blood over the patient's legs. At least, that was one line of thought; another line of thought argued that it had to be the blood of royalty. Some fairy godperson and magicoresearchers got together in the '80s and decided to research it methodically, going through every known case of siren's disease & what worked and what didn't. It turned out royalty was the key, but then it became a question of ethics. I didn't care too much at the time, that was all boring, grown-up stuff, but finally one researcher decided to just make a blood bank company, call it Prince's and see if that worked.
And it did.
Magic can be tricked, and my mind was blown.
I also asked my dad if we could put that book away for a little, because it was too scary. He agreed, and we put it on the top shelf, where all the scary books went. I reread it recently, and honestly? I don't remember what I was so afraid of.
Things started changing when I turned 16.
For one, my hair, which had always been brown, started darkening to black. For another, I stopped being able to tan. It was like a light switch went off; magic was determined to turn me into something, and I hated it. My PCFP really went to bat for me, getting insurance to cover the cost of cosmetic glamours and professional tanning sprays. She wanted me to tell my parents, but I didn't want to, not yet, and she was bound by her oath to protect my privacy.
She was right. But... I wanted to ignore it. I wanted to pretend everything was fine.
I didn't want to lose another mom.
And it worked for a while; managed to get to my senior year of high school before the world broke.
Stepmothers don't have the best reputation.
It fucking sucks, and it's not fair, but enough stories have been told about them that magic took an interest, and began manifesting curses that warp stepmothers until they follow the story.
We thought we were safe. My stepmother didn't bring any children into the marriage, so she was safe from the ash-girl curse variant, and I was a tanned brunette, so we were safe from the snow-daughter variant.
And she loved me.
She hid it too, I think. Not intentionally, but some of the symptoms are paranoia and anxiety.
I've done a lot of research. I don't think I'll ever be able to be a fairy godperson, but that doesn't mean I had to stop caring. I swapped my focus to researching curses from the history and literature side of things. I still work with researchers, we just come from different angles now.
Anyway, no one realized anything was wrong until she was french braiding my hair and the next thing I knew, she had locked herself in the bathroom sobbing while EMTs took me to the hospital for overnight observation. I don't actually know what happened. She turned herself over to the cops as soon I was loaded onto the ambulance, and she was taken to a hospital herself. She was sedated at first, as she was so wound up that she was hurting herself, and the hospital couldn't scan her for curses. Once she came out of sedation, she immediately called my dad and offered a divorce, he could take everything, she would leave immediately.
But we'd gotten the results of the scans, and I was fine. As best that the fairy godperson's could tell, the magic was frustrated that we didn't want to go down the snow-daughter route, and had lashed out in an attempt to force it. That was apparently what knocked me unconscious; magic poisoned the comb my stepmother was using in my hair.
That didn't mean she didn't feel guilty - but so did I. If I had told them earlier, would things have changed? If I hadn't tried to hide the signs that magic was fucking with us?
They don't blame me, and I don't blame her.
She loves me. I know she does. We still talk, as best as we can. She can only hear my voice for ten minutes before the curse starts taking over. We can email, though, as long as the orderlies can prescreen the email for any curse triggers. She also can't hear about me directly, but my dad will go and visit her, and tell me how she's doing. He refused to divorce her. His insurance still covers her hospital stay. He says he's married, and wears his ring.
When I applied to college, I wrote about all three of my parents, and how much they had all taught me.
How much they all loved me.
Someday, my stepmother will get her curse lifted, I have to believe that. I've joined a multidisciplinary group of researchers based in the EU. Some of us are looking at ways to trick magic, some of us are looking at ways to rewrite the stories of the wicked stepmothers, and create a new path for the magic to follow. One group of researchers is looking into ways of simulating the punishments that stepmothers receive at the end of tales to see if "punishing" stepmothers would break the curse. Actually going through the punishments would cause any ethical review board to remove someone's license, and there's no way I would want my stepmom to dance in red hot metal shoes.
But lately she's been getting hot stone foot massages before I call her; that's how we got to ten minutes before the massage took hold, and next week we're going to see if holding her feet in a hot bath lets us video call. Maybe someday we'll be able to see each other in person again. Maybe I'll be able to take her home where dad and I can cook dinner for her, and we can be a family again. My family has an apple pie recipe, and we never made it - I understand why, now, but maybe someday we can laugh at this and all make it together. To make your own apple pie, you'll need...
How did you get so good at writing??? Did you take classes? I feel like you should get paid all the money for this! (I subscribe to your website!)
after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while
read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.
you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.
i said it in my original tags but i want to talk out of my ass and say that one place that a lot of current romantasy falls short for me is that it ends up being written by people who mostly read other romantasy without going back to the original genres of romance and fantasy. it's like a 'learn the rules before you can break them' kind of thing. you have all these magical macguffins to hit the tropes but can you make me believe that these characters have chemistry without that? is there chemistry, or did you tell me they're fated mates and now i'm supposed to assume this fight is sexy? does the fantasy aspect exist for anything aside from the magical macguffins? i'm not going to throw stones from inside my house made of worldbuilding designed to make all my fetishes happen, but the really fun part is when the lore spins out of control and you end up really going in depth on linguistic anthropology things that aren't relevant to the makeouts.
and the other thing is that you can't really sub in fanfic for this. plenty of fanfic takes characters from other genres and plops them into romance, but it's not the same. a good romance novel says, "here are two characters. you may know their archetypes, but you don't know them. you are going to get to know them, and you are going to love them, and you are going to want them to love each other, and when they love each other you are going to be happy for them". i love a rakish duke. when a man who's never had to do his own laundry is slutty as fuck that's my shit. but you still have to make me like him. you can take that archetype and make a guy who fucking sucks. most fanfic will not impart to you any knowledge about how to make a reader like a guy from scratch. you already know that guy. that's the whole point. fanfic with as much character building as an original work is the exception, not the rule.
the whole reason i get catty about fics that just make a different guy is that... you've made a different guy. i don't know who this guy is and i don't like him, and you haven't bothered trying to make me like him, because you slapped another guy's nametag on him like a cheat code. it's cool if you did make me like this new guy, but why is he wearing that other guy's nametag if no other aspect of him is present?
read the genres you want to write, obviously, but there's a reason the shitty comphet romantic subplot is a cliche. it's because romance is its own skillset, and if you try to fit romance in your thriller when you only read thrillers it's probably going to be the weakest part. if you want an ensemble cast then chemistry between characters is important regardless of whether they're going to fuck about it.
When inventing a fantasy religion a lot of people a) make the mistake of assuming that everyone in fantasy world would worship the same gods and b) assume that polytheistic religions see all of their gods as morally good
Some types of religions for your world building (any of these ideas can stand alone or be combined with each other):
One god, don’t play with any others.
Everything is God
One big god or small group of gods made everything but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other smaller ones that work for the big one(s)
There’s one god but all of these hundreds of gods are aspects of that one god and the aspects of the one god can absolutely marry each other and have marital squabbles
Individuality is an illusion and the universe is a series of vibes experiencing itself
The world used to be an egg but then that egg became a god and then that god made some other gods and then those gods became bored and made the universe and then they got to screwing each other to make even more gods and now there’s hundreds of them and exactly what gods are worshiped changes on who you ask in a particular region
Everything has a soul. Act like it.
Someone or something spoke the world into existence and we’ve been stealing other people’s stories ever since we’ll take whatever gods you have
A bunch of regional gods got smushed together and now there’s a state mandated religion that’s trying to make this smaller pantheon more popular than local folk religion
The difference between a god, a nature spirit, and a legendary person is extremely unclear even to worshipers but there’s shrines to all of them
A god chose these people to be their special guys and their special guys are gonna have a tough time. That god may be the only god or it may be one of many those people believe exist
Humans were kinda stupid until this one spirit or person showed up and taught them how to do stuff so now we do stuff to thank the person or thing that taught us how to do stuff
The world will keep on ending and being rebuilt it just does that sometimes nobody knows when it started or if it ever did
You can learn a lot from talking animals.
People were made to do work the god(s) don’t wanna do
People were made because the god(s) were lonely/bored/drunk
This river in particular is the most important thing in the whole universe
You need to get better philosophy. This guy was good at philosophy. Read his book.
As an additional difference - that's probably covered in one of the links above - you might want to consider that some religions are orthopractic and some are orthodox. Orthodox here not being used in the usual sense, but meaning that the religion places more importance on the right belief or the right teachings (i.e. dogma). Orthopractic, in contrast, means that the important thing is right actions/behaviour.
I'm obviously simplifying here because I currently don't have the spoons to go into more detail, but an example for orthodoxy would be Christianity, while e.g. ancient Greek religion would fall under orthopraxy.
“If you say yes,” said the Devil, “a single man, somewhere in the world, will be killed on the spot. But three million dollars is nothing to sneeze at, missus.”
“What’s the catch?” You squint at him suspiciously over the red-and-black striped carnival booth. You’re smarter than he thinks you are– a devil deal always has a catch, and you’re determined to catch him before he catches you.
“Well, the catch is that you’ll know you did it. And I’ll know, too. And the big man upstairs’ll know, I ‘spose. But what’s the chariot of salvation without a little sin to grease the wheels? You can repent from your mansion balcony, looking out at your waterfront views, sipping a bellini in your eighties. But hey, it’s up to you– take my deal or leave it.”
The Devil lights a cigar without a match, taking an inhale, and blowing out a cloud of deep, sweet-smelling tobacco laced faintly with something that reminds you of rotten eggs. If he does have horns, they’re hidden under his lemon yellow carnival barker hat. He wears a clean pinstripe suit and a red bowtie. No cloven hooves, no big pointy fork, but you know he’s the Devil without having to be told. Though he did introduce himself.
He’s been perfectly polite.
You know you need the money. He knows it too, or he wouldn’t have brought you here, to this strange dark room, whisking you away from your new house in the suburbs as fast as a wish. Now you’re in some sort of warehouse, where all the windows seem to be blacked out– or, maybe, they simply look out into pitch darkness, though it is the middle of the day. A single white spotlight shines down on the two of you.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” you say. “I bet the man is someone I know, right? My husband?”
“Could be,” the Devil says with a pointed grin. “That’s for the wheel to decide.”
He steps back and raises his black-gloved hand as the tarp flies off of the large veiled object behind him. The light of the carnival wheel nearly blinds you. Blinking lights line the sides. Jingling music blares over speakers you can’t see. The flickering sign above it reads:
THE DEVIL’S WHEEL
“Step right up and claim your fortune,” the Devil barks. “Spin the wheel and pay the price! Or leave now, and a man keeps his life.”
You examine the wheel.
The gambling addict
The doting boyfriend
The escaped convict
The dog dad
The secretive sadist
“These are all the possible men I can kill?” You ask, thumbing the side of the wheel. It rolls smoothly in your hand. Then you quickly stop, realizing that this might constitute a spin under the Devil’s rules. He flashes a smile at you, watching you halt its motion.
“Addicts, convicts, murderers– plenty of terrible options for you to land on, missus!”
“Serial wife murderer?”
“Now who would miss a fellow like that? I can guarantee that the whole world would be better off without him in it, and that’s a fact.”
The hard worker
The compulsive liar
The animal torturer
The widower
The desperate businessman
The failed musician
The beloved son
“My husband is on here too,” you say.
“Your husband Dave, yes. The wheel has to be fair, otherwise there’s simply no stakes.”
“I know what’s gonna happen,” you say, crossing your arms. “This wheel is rigged. I’m gonna spin it around, and it’ll go through all the killers and stuff, and then it’s gonna land on my husband no matter what.”
“Why, I would never disgrace the wheel that way,” the Devil says, wounded. “I swear on my own mother’s grave– may she never escape it. In fact, take one free spin, just to test it out! This one’s on me, no death, no dollars.”
You cautiously reach up to the top of the wheel and feel its heaviness in your hand. The weight of hundreds of lives. But also, millions of dollars. You pull the wheel down and let it go.
Clackity-clackity-clackity-clackity
Round and round it goes.
The college graduate
The hockey fan
The Eagle Scout
The cold older brother
The charming younger brother
The two-faced middle child
The perfectionist
The slob
Your husband Dave
Clackity-clackity-clackity.
Finally, the wheel lands on a name. A title, really.
The photographer
“Hmm, tough, missus, but that’s the way of the wheel. But hey, look! Your husband is allllll the way over here,” he points with his cane to the very bottom of the wheel, all the way on the other side from where the arrow landed. “As you can see, it’s not rigged. The wheel truly is random.”
“So… there really isn’t another catch?” You ask.
“Isn’t it enough for you to end a man’s life? You need a steeper price? If you’re really such a glutton for punishment, I’ll gladly re-negotiate the terms.”
“No, no… wait.” You examine the wheel, glancing between it and the Devil.
You really could use that three million dollars. Newly married, new house, you and your husband’s combined debt– those student loans really follow you around. He’s quite a bit older than you, and even he hasn’t paid them off yet, to the point where the whole time you were dating you watched him stress out about money. You had to have a small, budget wedding, and a small, budget honeymoon. Three million dollars could be big for the two of you. You could re-do your honeymoon and go somewhere nice, like Hawaii, instead of just taking two weeks in Atlantic City. You deserve it.
Even so, do you really want to kill an innocent photographer? Or an innocent seasonal allergy sufferer? Or an innocent blogger? Just because you don’t know or love these people doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t.
The cancer survivor
The bereaved
The applicant
Some of these were so vague. They could be anyone, honestly. Your neighbors, your father, your friends…
The newlywed
The ex-gifted kid
The uncle
The Badgers fan
“My husband is a Badgers fan,” you say.
“How lovely,” the Devil says.
Then it hits you.
Of course.
The weightlifter.
The careful driver.
The manager.
The claustrophobe.
Your husband Dave lifts weights at the gym twice a month. You wouldn’t call him a pro, but he does it. He also drives like he’s got a bowl of hot soup in his lap all the time, because he’s afraid of being pulled over. He just got promoted to management at his company, and he takes the stairs to his seventh-story office because he hates how small and cramped the elevator is.
“I get your game,” you announce. “You thought you could get me, but I figured you out, jackass!”
“Oh really? What is my game, pray tell?” The Devil responds, leaning against his cane.
“All these different titles– they’re all just different ways to describe the same guy. My husband isn’t one notch on the wheel, he’s every notch. No matter what I land on, Dave dies. I’m wise to your tricks!”
The Devil cackles.
“You’re a clever one, that’s for sure. I thought you’d never figure it out.”
“Thanks but no thanks, man,” you say with a triumphant smirk. “I’m no rube. No deal. Take me back home.”
“As you wish, missus,” the Devil says. He snaps his fingers, and you’re gone, back to your brand-new house with your new husband. “Don’t say I never tried to help anyone.”
