[image description: six gifs, each a short loop featuring different Star Trek characters from various series, all played by Black actors (all playing human characters except where otherwise noted), and overlaid with parts of a quotation (by Avery Brooks, who played the role of Benjamin Sisko), as follows:
ST:TOS’s Lt. Nyota Uhura, smiling and speaking to someone out of frame; text “brown children”;
ST:TNG’s Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge and the El-Aurian Guinan seated across from one another in a booth in Ten-Forward; text “must be able”;
ST:DS9’s Capt. Benjamin Sisko, seated in the Defiant’s command chair, lacing his fingers together contemplatively; text “to participate”;
ST:VOY’s Vulcan Lt. Tuvok, looking quizzically at someone off-screen; text “in”;
ST:ENT’s Ensign Travis Mayweather, climbing upside-down along a bulkhead in zero-g; text “contemporary”;
ST:DSC’s Cmdr. Michael Burnham, smiling tearfully at something or someone behind the camera position; text “mythology”;
quotation in full reads “brown children must be able to participate in contemporary mythology”.
(Not canon adherent at all. This woke me up in a dream at 3 am, so I wrote it)
When you arrive, the first thing he notices is your smell. You reek. Not of piss or shit (the usual scents humans wafted in the throne room), but the deep wet tang of arousal.
Disgust curls his lip. “You want me to fuck you.”
That sent you reeling, a bug-eyed chorus of “no no no” and some piss-poor explanation about working with his wife in Wallachia as a physician’s assistant.
The way you bow – step-tap of polished black shoes as you lower too quickly and rise again, flushed – reminds him of a dog tripping over its feet to greet its master.
But a physician is useful to keep his blood bags alive, so he agrees.
The indiscretion follows, an apple tumbled from the cart. Bruised. Rotten.
To your credit, it is months of careful performance before your need breaches the surface.
You move about the castle like deer approach an open clearing – footfalls flitting, never landing. You turned apology to rosary, words worn to smooth beads in your mouth: “Sorry”, “I’ll come back later”, “Didn’t mean to disturb”.
The bleating deference was cause enough to kill you. But you hadn’t lied when you told him that you worked alongside Lisa, or that you were an eager learner.
In the months since you moved into the castle, you’d caught on quickly.
You spent the first few weeks updating your knowledge, poring through the library’s texts at a rate he thought only his wife capable.
Soon after you entered the lab, dusting off Lisa’s instruments and continuing in her notebook.
The first time he saw you with it, black leather tome smudged with her loping cursive, he stopped. You held the gaze a moment, then went back to work.
It was the only time you didn’t apologize.
One night soon after he heard a noise on his way to the tower. Slrrp, then again – fainter, irregular, accompanied by a hitching, pleasured gasp.
When he looked through the cracked door, you were two fingers deep in your cunt, dress rucked up as you writhed.
It was mundane, really.
Sex. Money. Power. Humans were the same since time immemorial.
The sight hardly moved him; the scent bade him enter.
Beneath the iron croon of blood and animal musk of your wet was a resurrection – rose, parchment, clove, orange. It wasn’t the exact blend, but close enough to be an unmistakable copy.
A pang churned his stomach, would’ve forced the air from his lungs had they still respirated.
“You’re wearing her perfume,” he says, not bothering to announce himself.
Your eyes fly open, your hands rush to cover. The performance is not altogether convincing. Yes the motions are correct, as is your shriek of discovery.
But your eyes – heavy-lidded, almost relieved by intrusion – give you away.
“You want me to fuck you,” he says, peering at your form like a vivisection under magnifying glass.
This time, the truth. “Yes.”
The humans he kept were forgemasters, explicit in purpose and even more so in their passionate hatred of humanity.
You were meant keep the feeding populace relatively healthy – a glorified veterinarian. Beyond that…you were a tenuous link, an unwelcome echo that insisted on miming the inimitable.
Still, even a dull shadow was worth indulging if it ignited a flicker of what once was.
“Wait.”
The command freezes you in place, though he can practically hear the frisson of your nerves.
When he returns, he holds a bottle out to you.
Crystal, glittering under candlelight with a brass rose stopper. You uncork it without a word, dabbing the amber liquid on all the points his teeth could tear.
“Not a word.” You nod and lay back, eyes fixed on the ceiling.
The act itself is clinical.
You’re prepared enough for him to enter without preamble; he’s determined enough to make quick work of it. But your eyes still widen and your fingers still grasp at his shoulders – he grunts, live flesh fused against dead.
When your cunt clenches – choked sob ripped from your lips – it conjures Lisa. Fair where you are not, angelic where you bray.
His wife, where you…you…
A strangled, growling release cuts the thought short. When he looks down, you’re on the cusp of your own fit, pleading gaze boring into his.
For a moment, he considers splitting your neck with his nails. But he looks at the perfume on your nightstand and ruts once, twice until you’re brought over the edge.
Silently you compose yourself as he dresses to leave, crackling hearth flame the only sound.
The next overwatch update removes all gameplay except for the ability to generate animated porn of tracer whenever the spacebar is pressed, and a battlepass.
One trap that All the Time Daydreamers, Sometimes Writers, fall into is this idea that writing is transcribing the daydream.
It’s not. The daydream is a fuzzy thing. There are gaps that you don’t need to fill in a daydream, because you already get the emotional point. A lot of it is emotion. And because it makes you feel like a complete story would, your brain is tricked into thinking that’s what you have.
Then you sit down to actually write the thing and you realize you’re trying to write a Space Opera without actually inventing any planets or space ships. You don’t even know if the characters start out on the same planet. If they’re on a planet at all. You didn’t bother to check.
Now you will vaguely reference this in first-second person in any writing guide you make up for the rest of time.
When you write, you’re building something. It’s not a pale imitation of what you have in your head- what you have in your head can’t exist on the outside. This is a whole new beast. It’s going to ultimately look different and this is a good thing.
Also the internal critic is dumb.
I’m not even trying to be nice to your writing specifically here. The internal critic is looking for a completed story and you don’t have one yet. So anything it has to say flat out does not apply.
This is so relatable that I’ve considered making this post many times.
The idea in your head is wonderful because it gives you all the emotions and ideas without pesky things like concrete details and logic getting in the way. Trying to write it down forces you to decide those things, which makes it a different story from the one that exists as a pure cloud of imagination. Story ideas can have multiple conflicting ideas happen at once–you just know the general gist and it doesn’t matter what order things happen in or which exact words are said. When you write it down, that cloud of possibilities collapses into a single reality–if Character says this line first, that means they can’t say it later; if they say Funny Line A, they can’t also say Funny Line B at that same spot in the conversation; if they go left that means they can’t also go right at that moment. Infinite possibility becomes reality, and those choice can be hard. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the moment you try to nail down a concrete timeline, issues like, “No one would react this way” or “That actually makes no sense” or “What is the mystery they’re trying to solve?” pop up and wreck the beautiful little thing in your imagination.
Any act of writing is an act of translation. You’re adapting it into a new medium. Which makes it not the thing in your head, but which does make it something you can share with your sadly non-telepathic audience. If you can figure out how to write it.
Get off social media! I know it’s tempting to blabber on about a WIP to get those hella cool notes, but doing so only reinforces that writing’s only fun if it gets you attention. We all need that boost now and again, but too much of it will whittle away your self-reliance. Close your laptop, leave your phone in a different room, and sit down with a notebook if possible and if you need to. You’ll get to know what enthralls you personally about your story.
Don’t write for an audience for now. Tumblr likes to do this thing where it says “blah blah blah X is problematic in media” and while it’s well-intentioned, internalizing too much of this can make you feel like you’re trying to write through a maze and constantly failing at it. Forget about your audience–you can flag and catch problematic stuff in edits after tossing it to the betas.
Remember what made thirteen-year-old you lose their mind? Yeah, write that. Once you’ve let go of writing for an audience, you won’t worry about being “cringey” anymore, and that’s when things start to get real good and real fun. You don’t have to show your writing to anyone, or even tell them you wrote it, so just go buckwild! Trust me, it’s so liberating.
Your inner critic is useful–but not now. Shut that bitch up! Your job when drafting is to make something. If you did that, you win, so your critic’s opinion is worth squat here. However, if you try to fight her {I always envision mine as some bitchy middle-aged woman lol} she’s just gonna get louder. So tell yourself you can be as critical of your writing as you want during edits. You’re not working for perfect, or even good right now. You’re working for existing.
Remember that this is a process. Companies like tumblr are investing a BUNCH of cash into getting you to stay glued to their platforms, and if you’re a creator this might manifest in your feeling like you need to live your creative life online. You don’t. But retraining your brain isn’t easy. Remember that divorcing yourself from the validation of online noise takes work and time and a lot of discomfort and redirecting, especially for folks like me who thrive on routine. And don’t discipline. Redirect. Negativity has no right to be in your creative space ♥️
