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[goose-books]

max’s WIPs: a table of contents

i’ve been meaning to remake my navigation page for months, and thus i present: a mobile-friendly, rebloggable post containing all of the WIPs i currently post about on this blog!

desktop users, my desktop projects page is here :-)

and you can find a masterpost of my posted content here!

Two kingdoms stand in opposition: the realm known as the raven kingdom and the realm known as the dove kingdom. The only barrier between them is the near impassable forest...

AKA: gay/trans/mentally ill teenagers vs. ancient fae magic; found family & flower symbolism

genre: YA high fantasy / young adult

status: hiatus

intro post | page | tag

Caelum Finch, prophet, knows three things. One: he is going to die this year. Two: Dawn Andrews is the Chosen One (the bad kind). Three: if he doesn’t tell her that parenthetical, he can convince her to help him fulfill his destiny.

Dawn Andrews, art student, knows three things. One: she is not the Chosen One. Two: Caelum Finch is about to get her in a lot of trouble. Three: she’s definitely going to help him anyway.

AKA: magical nyc full of monsters! but capitalism was the real monster all along.

genre: NA urban fantasy / new adult

status: hiatus

intro post | page | tag

Rahma Ashiq didn’t expect her sophomore year of high school to be quite so Shakespearean.  But she’s determined to vlog her way through the chaos: the freak thunderstorms, the ghost sightings, the usurpation of the drama club presidency, the theater director who might be a faerie queen, all of the mental breakdowns, and, of course, the girl Rahma with whom might be in hopeless, star-crossed,  all-consuming love.

AKA: “what if romeo and juliet, hamlet, and macbeth were all happening at the same time and also to high schoolers?”

genre: tragicomedy / podcast

status: scripts finished; not sure what to do now

intro post | page | tag

Dissatisfied golden girl Cressida Stayer wants nothing more than to escape the cunning socialites of the Dovermorry Mage’s Guild. Dispossessed bastard Jasper Greenwood wants nothing more than to become one of them. Both teenagers live under the shadow of Cressida’s father, Leovald: the most powerful man in the city, and one who splinters further every day.

AKA: a modern king lear retelling, but, like, one that is kind of weird about being a modern king lear retelling

genre: YA speculative fiction

status: editing

intro post | page | tag

A therapy patient narrates the story of four days in the life of disaffected, neurotic seventeen-year-old Valentine van Velt. Specifically: the final four days.

AKA: world’s most annoying teenager dicks off to New York to find their illegitimate dad, while being mentally ill about it

genre: YA psychological fiction

status: you can read it in full here!

intro post | page | tag

A murder, a madness, a letter from beyond the grave, and a whole lot of lesbians. College has never been this killer.

AKA: butch4butch trans4trans hamlet set at a modern women’s college

genre: dark comedy

status: brainstorming

page | tag

The city of Ivander: beautiful, breathtaking, burned. The golden god Iv: patron of duty, of loyalty, of a religion now desecrated and destroyed. The chosen one: Annadrijana Ivtouched, destined to quest across the world and rebuild Ivander atop the bones of another city.

AKA: the aeneid x game of thrones x julius caesar, except with 200% more lesbians & fantasy religion

genre: adult epic fantasy

status: drafting

intro post | page | tag

for more info about any of these, my inbox and dms are always open!

[feignedremote]

It happened to me, it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. It’s the only thing that ever happened to me. I own it.

Catherynne M. Valente, "The Red Girl," in The Bread We Eat in Dreams

[annabelle--cane]

no I am not "ontologically evil." this is a practiced skill that I actively fostered, it took work to get to be this evil, stop discrediting my efforts.

[prismantis]

commission of a vampire dreamboat for @albatris 🦇

[florraisons]

project introduction: valley's end

an interactive fiction game about coming home

in which you return to the village your family once cared for, meet your great-uncle's ghost, mourn your losses, and try to make sense of who you are meant to be.

(excerpt below the cut!)

You have come this far with the suggestion of a map: directions pieced together from the scraps of your mother’s memory and half-forgotten stories of your childhood, supplemented with visuals from travelogues of dubious accuracy from several decades ago, works that describe the northern half of the Valley as “quaint” and “charming” when they don’t describe it as terrifying instead. You have encountered very few people on your journey—a few scattered farmsteads, some half-abandoned villages, all of them perplexed at the sight of you—bright-eyed and young, fluent enough in the local language that you don’t sound entirely foreign and yet so distinctly not from here with your new backpack and city-stitched clothes. They share their food, offer you a bed when they can and the floor when they cannot, and very pointedly do not ask questions when you tell them you are seeking Valley’s End. It is a relief that no one offers to accompany you through the forest. You enter the forest just after sunrise, and by the time your pocket watch marks the noon hour—the sun is unreliable through the tree cover, though the magic does not make your watch much better—you are exhausted. You are not lost, but you only know that because you know there is only one road through the forest, and though vague about many a detail, the stories of your childhood were always perfectly clear about this: it is imperative you do not stray from the path.

[ellynneversweet]

Listened to a podcast on historical attitudes towards privacy yesterday that reminded me that the corridor is a relatively recent architectural feature, and it just blows my mind every time to imagine how different the way I navigate the world and imagine built environments as a 21st century westerner is from basically most of the human experience for all of history.

Obviously I’m not alone in this difference, but it is fascinating to look at media made by people who are culturally like me who take as a given things like ‘everyone in this story has a bedroom that is for their exclusive use, and they experience other people entering it uninvited (even family or people they share a home with) as a violation.’ That’s a huge aberration from the norm.

[ellynneversweet]

One point that I hadn’t picked up on before but made perfect sense in light of this setting is that a lot of historical artefacts have locks on them. Cabinets, chests, travelling desks, wardrobes, books — instead of the boundary of ‘all my things I don’t want other people to access go in a locked and closed room’ you had ‘all my things I don’t want other people to access go in their own individual locked boxes in a room everyone in my household can access.’

[cryptotheism]

Maybe the next guy will kind of fw being put to the sword

[goose-books]

you know how valentine van velt is a novel but also my desperate attempt to communicate my subjective experience of reading the catcher in the rye while being sick in the head. that one short story i wrote at clarion west, if i can ever wrangle it into a shape fit for the light of day, is that for dickens’ a tale of two cities

[goose-books]

great news from two years on: the fiction gods (litmag editors) have judged it fit for the light of day. it will be available on god's green internet within the next six months. do you know what that means? it means you, person following my blog, have time to read dickens' a tale of two cities if you start right now,

[ri5k]

i’m giving up personhood to become a full-time abstract concept

[johannestevans]

Also, consider. A magical version of the bends. Whenever someone from a non- or low-magical land has to go into a very magic rich forest or land or dimension, having to take breaks to let their bodies adjust to the new magic exposure or else their blood will boil in their veins or they'll Transform

[wormtoxin]

actually the bends only kicks in when you try to LEAVE the high pressure area. or in this case, magic rich area?

Getting deeper and deeper into feywilds and knowing that however deep you get, it’s gonna take twice as long to escape without magic tearing its way out of you

[maxxie-or-smth]

euthanizing myself recreationally

[onomatopiya]

A STORY by P.V. VAMSIDHAR — BULLSHIT LIT

Dido

DIDO

in which there is doomed yuri at taco bell.

CWs: ptsd, referenced murder/death

[ltwilliammowett]

Large lighthouse lamps with Fresnel lenses, 19th century

[the-punforgiven]

I'm just saying, if you're going to worldbuild magic being a "raw, primal force, akin to and interweaving with nature itself" you gotta explain to me why animals don't use it

[the-punforgiven]

I know the normal answer is "they just aren't smart enough for it" but idk I've seen enough media where a character uses a spell in a moment of brain-off panic ilI feel like animals could probably stumble into a spell or two like, accidentally

[stickittothepan]

HANGMAN

you better hang, man. | Short Fiction

HANGMAN you better hang, man. CONTENT WARNINGS: MILITARY / IMPERIALIST VIOLENCE, DEATH, CHILD DEATH, GORE. WORD COUNT: 730

Heaven’s noose tightens with each circling of the sun.

[helsinore]

i swear i write things that aren't just one really long scream. for example, this is one really short scream.

[narrativefate-deactivated202604]

Where are you on the sci-fi/fantasy Kinsey scale?

0 - exclusively sci-fi

1 - incidental fantasy

2 - more than incidental fantasy

3 - equally sci-fi and fantasy

4 - more than incidental sci-fi

5 - incidental sci-fi

6 - exclusively fantasy

Voting ended onApr 6

[imgonebabygone]