Oh God I'm Actually Doing This

Hello my lovelies my name is Firefly AKA Warren Peace and I write SFW G/t filth and cringe, and before you ask the other blog is indeed mine. Yes, I'm embarrassed by this. No I will not stop because it makes me happy and it makes other people happy and I am having fun. I'm sorry if you accidentally found this blog and you're normal. YOU CAN LIKE AND REBLOG THINGS BUT I AM NOT SOCIAL I AM HERE TO DO TWO THINGS: WRITE STORIES AND TOUCH GRASS. THIS BLOG IS INTENDED FOR GROWN-UPS. NOT BECAUSE OF ANYTHING LEWD BUT BECAUSE THE STORY GETS DARK IN PLACES AND I HAVE A PERSONAL VENDETTA AGAINST CHILDREN. Thank u for your understanding.

[fireflywritesgt]

Current Project

The Art of Love and War

Rejected by his family and existing within the fringes of tiny society, career trinket peddler Joe Piccoli enjoys a life of solitude in the floorboards of the abandoned Stinson House - until a human has the audacity to move in and spruce the place up. After waking up to a handwritten note and a gift addressed directly to him, he must resist the temptation to abandon all ties to his fellow miniatures for good by breaking the golden rule: never talk to a big person!

Haunted by the ghosts of the Great War and shaken by the sudden loss of his mother, if there is one thing Doctor Herman Avery needs it is solitude. Drawn to the loneliness of the allegedly haunted Stinson House, the doctor immediately takes to renovations - only to discover that the house is already occupied with a fascinating specimen he's never encountered before: a miniature. The doctor now finds himself determined to lure his new neighbour out, but will he ever be able to get the stubborn little fellow to talk?

Faced with the prospect of an unlikely friendship, the two men must navigate the struggles of identity, dependency, politics and trauma; all in the name of being less alone in a world much crueler - and much bigger - than the both of them.

Content Notes: Now rated 18+ out of an abundance of caution. There's no nsfw scenes in this, I just decided I don't like watering myself down for children. In writing this story, I asked myself one question: if tiny people were real, how would society treat them? This story is my attempt at giving an honest answer to that question. Set in 1926; there are sensitive themes in this work, of loss and trauma, ethnic and class division, prejudice, internalized homophobia and social unrest. The pet trope gets actively deconstructed and examined in this. It is not a work for everyone, and it's okay if this isn't the work for you - please take care of yourself. For those who are interested in exploring further, welcome! Get ready to have some feelings.

INDEX:

Part 1: The Trick to Eating Chocolate

Part 2: Talking to the Walls

Part 3: Captain Calloway's

Part 4: Forbidden Knowledge

Part 5: A Civilized Place to Be

Part 6: Marked

Part 7: Unmarked

Part 8: Counting the Cost

Part 9: A Safe Place to Be

Part 10: Wild

Part 11: Mouse on a Motorcycle

Part 12: Caught

Part 13: The Eyes along the Docks

Part 14: In the Dark of the Rain

Part 15: In the Warmth of the Window

Part 16: The Assistant

Part 17: Harry in a Hospital

Part 18: Mathilde

Part 19: Intricate Rituals

Part 20: Mutters the Clown

Part 21: Terror in Tiny Town

Part 22: The Right Thing

Part 23: The Night Market

Part 24: A Small and Precious Thing

Part 25: Scared

Part 26: A Like Vision

Part 27: House on a Hill

Part 28: Happy Birthday, Georgie Marshall

Part 29: A Journey Shared

Part 30: Happy

Part 31: In Love and War

Part 32: A Hint of Spite

Part 33: Subject to Review

Part 34: A Passing Shadow

Part 35: Starlight over Sunnyside

Part 36: Strength

Part 37: Hairpin Turn

Part 38: A Happy Place to Be

Part 39: Untamed

Part 40: Good Neighbours

Part 41: The Glint of the Knife

Part 42: An Empty Space

Part 43: In the Cold of the Cage

Part 44: The Problem with Joe Piccoli

Part 45: Romeo

Part 46: Dogs of War

Part 47: Welcome Home

Part 48: Three Ghosts

Part 49: The Altar of Petdom

Part 50: Scars

Part 51: Almost Free

Part 52: Artist Unknown

Part 53: Will get here when it gets here. 💜

[ashen-crest]

I can do it. I can write a chapter. I am capable of putting sentences together. I know what a comma is. I am Aware of the Character.

[fireflywritesgt]

[fireflywritesgt]

The Point of it All

People like to say things like, "omg Joe Piccoli is so me! I am Joe and Joe is me!" What I hope they understand is, Joe Piccoli was "me" before he was ever you, and to some extent he has always embodied some very personal anxieties I have around my relationship with my own creativity.

For ages now I've been struggling with the point of it all. From a very young age I was introduced very personally to how vile other people can be. It's something I've carried with me well into my adult years, and to date nothing and no one has alleviated it. If anything, the older I get the more disappointed I become with other people. Years go on and my mistrust only deepens.

What is the point of doing creative and emotional labour for people who don't fully appreciate you as a person? What is the point of spilling your soul out onto a page to entertain folks who, if they knew the whole of what you were, would only understand the richness of your subjectivity as a parlour trick, or perhaps conceive of it as some grand bid for attention? There is a reason Joe has the exchange that he does with Richard in the cage - it takes the core of the struggle Joe faces against the rest of the world and grinds it down to the finest sand, then sieves it through the finest sieve:

You do not have the privilege of being a (real) person.

I challenge that, of course, as the author. I myself would not be "real" to other people along multiple axes: my gender identity, my neurotype, my trauma, not to mention other aspects that are too personal to list - I don't trust anyone to take these things about me seriously. At best they'll get laughed off or smiled-and-nodded through; never contextualized or appreciated as something holding real weight and value. At worst they'll get actively derided or thought of as something dangerous, something scary, something that needs to be controlled and eradicated for the good of others... dare I say, something petlike.

To what degree is it worth it to make art for those people?

Am I making art for those people? Some days it feels like I am. Like doing so is an inevitability as a direct result of living in a world I do not fit into, and for that reason I must explain, explain, explain, and try over and over again to prove myself to you, just as Joe must constantly prove himself to Harry.

I personally believe that epistemic injustice lies at the seat of all injustice (or at the very least it has been the thorny heart beating at the core of all other injustices I have directly faced), and if epistemic injustice could speak, all would say would be "prove it" over and over again. And no matter what evidence you provided to those holding the power, no matter how viciously you poured out your heart to whatever distant judge on the podium was weighing your soul, it would never be enough. Never rational enough, never genuine enough, never real enough to prove itself worthy of the same respect everyone else receives implicitly.

Anyways, it's pride season where I live, and I love pride because it flies in the face of all that - or at least it's supposed to. I can go somewhere for a few hours and be sparkly and nonsensical and not fit in without punishment, because fitting in isn't the point. Difference, something once feared and vilified, becomes celebrated - not for the sake of being "special" as so many seem to believe, but for the sake of being comfortable.

I deserve that comfort. I have to remind myself of that constantly whenever I backspace the they/them pronouns out of my signature at work, or mask so hard around other people that the mask burns into my skin. I deserve to exist freely and naturally. I deserve to stretch out and Be, no matter how poorly other people might handle it - because it's not about them at the end of the day. It's about me.

So maybe if there's one good thing that can come out of my writing, it is the reminder that, no matter who you are, and no matter how strange you may be, and regardless of whether you may be accepted by others or not, or how superficially absurd showing you dignity may seem at the end of the day, you are a person worthy of that dignity. And if nobody else will give it to you, you will just have to reclaim it for yourself. Maybe that is the point I've been searching for all along.

[danskjavlarna]

Source details and larger version.

All sorts of vintage book imagery is here in my virtual stacks.

[fireflywritesgt]

TAOLAW is now "for everyone" in the sense that I still really do not like the idea of children reading it but I like the idea of forcing grown adults to dox themselves to a sinister corporation in order to read it even less.

[alteredpanel]

[fireflywritesgt]

Welp.

In light of recent changes, I'll be turning off reblogs on future chapters.

[fireflywritesgt]

Getting Old Skool with my latest outlining attempt.

[fuckyeahfightlock]

I feel like I'm the last person alive writing in Word, but wanted to share this because it might save someone some heartache.

I am used to Word autosaving relentlessly; for the last few years it didn't really even have a "File>Save" command that I could see--it just autosaved like every five seconds or something. It took me a long time to get used not clicking File>Save at the end of every writing session, and I never really trusted it--with good reason, it turns out.

Apparently, when you turn off Word's new ai features, AutoSave is disabled and cannot be turned back on. There is toggle button in the upper left for it, but when I try to toggle it on, it says "Autosave is not available because of your privacy settings." I worked in my document yesterday, put my computer to sleep with the doc still open on the taskbar (my usual habit), and when I opened it today, the new work I did yesterday was gone.

This time I only lost about 300 words, which I had typed into my document from my longhand-writing in a notebook (so I guess I kind of autosaved them that way!), but if I'd really been on a roll, this could have been a disaster.

Be careful out there. Everything is terrible!

[helloliriels]

Yeah, they're baking it into essential compontents now so we'll stop turning it off. Noticed that in several programs. FFS I hate all of these tech bros.

[fireflywritesgt]

The spoils of my historical research into the old courthouse and jail. Once the site of several ghastly hangings, it has since been defanged, gutted, and - from what I can see of it - turned into a private wedding venue.

People describe the jail as being "in the basement" but here it's part of the ground floor... my guess is that they put the registrar and sheriff and all the respectable shit above the jail cells, and the Felons section in the first image was actually the de-facto basement. There was a larger jail site than this to the rear which I can't find the layout of. From my understanding there was a solitary confinement cell somewhere on-site. I was pleased to find that the ivy was also there ca. 1926... the bars on the upper windows are also of interest to me. I wonder if someone small enough could fit through them if the glass was kicked out...

I guess we'll just have to find out.

[fireflywritesgt]

[madnessofmen]

Kind of obsessed with this woman's freakishly modern jacket from 1904.

The complete lack of shoulder definition gives it the silhouette of an MA-1 bomber jacket, but bombers weren't even a thing yet. The Wright brothers barely achieved powered flight in 1903. The ribbing on the shoulder and the angular cutouts with the hexagonal mesh are so futuristic and cyberpunk, but even art deco wouldn't be a thing for another 15 years. The color is like a dusty NASA flight suit. All together it's giving lone spacefarer crash landing their tiny rustbucket ship on Mars.

Truly a visionary of her time.

[tea-potato-gt]

I think I aged 30 years in two days 💀

Like, at every turn I think that it couldn’t get anymore stressful or upsetting, and the punches just kept coming 😩😩😣😣 10/10 would recommend😀👍😎👍🥲

Welcome back to me screaming. This is memes part 5 for @fireflywritesgt and their story “The Art of Love and War.”

Part 1 / part 2 / part 3 / part 4 / “Happy”

🚨Spoilers ahead!🚨

***

If I had to describe the characters in a few words: (click for the video)

The bar fight in chapter 46:

⬆️ That’s what I call progress 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🥹🥹

***

“Love in a Bottle,” I think this song pretty much sums up how Joe spent the four months drowning his pain and numbness with Wine and Cigarettes at the Wilkins mansion:

🎤🎶 “I'm leavin' behind all of the cares that I've been overthinkin'

Find friends in my wine

Stay unaware's just as long as I'm drinking...

Love in a bottle, love in a bottle

Can't have love when it comes in a bottle

Home in a bottle, numb in a bottle

I don't need nothin' that's not from a bottle

Another round!”🎵🎤

***

Reasons I have shed literal tears in the last few chapters: 🥲🥲😭😭😢😢

Joe saying he was scared of Herman’s hands and didn’t want him anymore. That’s when I realized it was really over for them. (47) (I support Joe in his decision, but it still hurt. ✊😔)

Danny saying goodbye and telling Harry to take care of himself. (The growth between them. 😭😭) When it said that Herman would be alone in that house for a long time. 💔💔💔 (48)

When I realized it had been 4 months since they last saw eachother. (49) ⌛️

The deviation I felt when I noticed that Joe and Harry are creating art, something they liked doing and sharing with eachother, but now find it miserable and unfulfilling. Harry playing piano for money and Joe painting for Walter. They lost their passions like they lost eachother. 🪦

When Harry finally did the right thing and when Joe said “Let’s go home.” 😭😭 (52) Tears of joy 🥹🥹

I remember all the way back in chapter 15, Joe understood how painful it would be for Harry if he left and didn’t come back. It would haunt him. It did haunt Harry. And Harry promised he’d come looking for Joe if he went missing. He did go looking for Joe and found him! 😭😭😭

***

I mean, Harry’s in jail now, but I can live with that 😂 (Joe finally asked to go back home and Harry knows he loves Joe!) 🥹

[tea-potato-gt]

Hey, long time no see! 🫣🫣🫣

I’m back with memes part 4 for the awesomely talented @fireflywritesgt and their story “The Art of Love and War”

Other parts here: Part 1 / part 2 / part 3 / Happy

🚨Major spoilers ahead!🚨

***

Herman *derogatory*

POV: You are Herman Avery and you just told Billy that you put Joe in a jar…

(Deserved, Billy was totally justified. 👊 I was about to be next in line istg 🙄😠.)

[fireflywritesgt]

[fireflywritesgt]

I'm will be adding illustrations to TAOLAW whenever I feel like it if I like said illustrations enough. I have been wanting to do this for a while. I hope it enhances the experience.