the gladdest thing under the sun

niamh ✹ 24 ✹ frog enthusiast i follow from fruitjuices

[llesbianwrites]

✹ LLESBIANWRITES — a writeblr introduction.

technically a reintro, but who’s counting! 

✹ about

hi! i’m niamh, i’m 23, and i’ve been on (and off) writeblr since late 2019

currently in grad school for epidemiology

i’m a lesbian and my wips reflect that. if you see me writing a man no you don’t

i’ve never met a wip i can’t put a lil horror in :) while i usually stick to fantasy/sci-fi, i like to think my stuff is more character focused than anything else 

currently reading: the books of jacob by olga tokarczuk! other faves include the broken earth trilogy by n.k. jemisin and mostly dead things by kristen arnett

CURRENTLY WRITING . . .

✹ VARICOSE. — a vampire and a doctor band together to save their city from devastation. 

featuring: a mile wide guilt complex, the consequences of overworking, and blood.

COMPLETED . . .

✹ WAYWARD. — three monster hunters bite off more than they can chew in their search for mysterious fragments. featuring: a mage with a homicidal tendency that just won't quit, underground city adventures, and knife fights with your crush's ex.  

✹ THE RED SUN EATS YOU ALIVE. — tired twentysomething tries to survive the post-apocalyptic hellscape of arizona. featuring: mother figures, a haunted desert, and evil doctors.

✹ SALTSKIN. — alys and her crew face the impossible task of bottling sunlight. this, somehow, becomes the least of their worries. featuring: the sea, the sun, and what hides in between.

✹ HUNGRY GHOSTS. — clementine’s brother was stolen. she’s not stopping until she gets him back. featuring: cave adventures, two distinct enemies to friends to lovers subplots, and eating the rich.

IN THE FUTURE . . .

✹ THE FAMILY BUSINESS. — monsterhunter falls in love (twice). this saves no one.

✹ AT THE END OF EVERYTHING. — the cold march of academia stops for no one. not even the end times.

✹ WARMTH TWICE REMOVED. — down on their luck pirate crew risks everything in search of a mythical treasure (that may or may not be friendship).

[ur-favorite-fishgirl]

if you vote me for president i vow to make everything the ocean again. no more land only ocean. this will solve all of our problems and replace them with new, far more interesting problems

[ohevoyev]

lisa peterson and denis o’hare, an iliad

[all-seeing-eyer]

Text ID:

Now the man called Hector.

(Struggling.) Shining Hector. Man-killing Hector. Hektoros hippo-damoio. (He translates.) Hector breaker of horses—it's always so hard to describe Hector—

His little brother calls him a "sharp ax"—a sharp edge, always cleaving forward...

Hector believes in—he believes in institutions, he believes in—in country, he believes in family, he believes in the army. Isn't it funny how hard it is to describe a good man?

He's a brave man, but deep down, he'd rather be taming horses.

[whiteshakira]

my unwritten novels were snubbed at the international booker prize once again

[ohcaptains]

[enyter]

[leebrontide]

Can I offer a reframe of the common "write the shitty first draft" advice? I like that advice a lot but I think the way it's often presented bounces off a lot of people and activates shit that does not help writing happen.

I think of the first draft as an armature.

If I was making a beautiful bronze statue, I would need to make a clay model first. And, depending on the shape, before I even got out my clay I would need to get some good thick wire and create a basic shape for the clay to adhere to, so it doesn't all fall down. Once I have this essential 3D wire frame, I can start building and subtracting and refining.

But if I try to refine on just clay, it won't have enough of a core to hold it up. I'll sculpt a beautiful hand only to have the whole arm fall off and go smush.

The armature isn't the sculpture. It is the frame you build the sculpture around.

The first draft isn't the novel, it's a sort-of-novel-shaped thing that will hold up everything you build and beautify later.

Write the armature draft. Try to make it a good armature, instead of trying to make it a good novel before it's ready.

[gr8writingtips]

do you have the courage to write a terrible first draft?

[lost-in-eriador]

in 2026, remember how GOOD writing feels. remember how satsfying it is to get your characters to the point you have been dying to get to, where they will experience the love, fear, relief or whatever the feeling you want to bring to life may be. let this year be the year of writing, prgress and of satisfactory endings.

[the-walrus-squad]

From “Consider This” by Chuck Palahniuk

[llesbianwrites]

sometimes i get sad when i remember how much i loved writing and how i wasn’t even thinking about getting published i was just doing it bc i loved it. and now i haven’t written anything in almost two years :(

[regardintemporel]

Barbara Kruger - Untitled (Business as usual), 1987

[cool-person-yey]

big fan of liars. big fan of characters whose entire existence is a facade. love it when everything's stripped away from them and the lie is the only thing left of their identity. love it when the lines between an act and the truth are blurring. are they even them without the lie? the lie doesn't become the truth per se, but it's now such an intricate part of them it might as well be.

[cool-person-yey]

if that lie becomes their ruin then? delicious.

[desimonewayland]

Andrew Wyeth

Night Hauling 1944

Tempera on masonite

Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine

Night Hauling was painted by the twenty-seven-year-old Andrew Wyeth at the height of World War Two. Set against the Maine coast in Port Clyde, where Wyeth’s family summered, it depicts a shadowy lobsterman hauling in a trap under cover of darkness, the scene lit only by the figure’s concealed lamp and the water’s startling nocturnal phosphorescence. 

[agentravensong]

characters who see themselves as more of a Force or an abstract concept acting in the world than as a person. characters who prioritize their role as a cog in some greater mechanism over their own personhood. characters who get their hands dirty, who run themselves ragged, who take on an unbearable weight, who hurt or neglect or give up or straight-up betray the people and things they once held close, because they believe in doing so they are fulfilling their Purpose, the thing they exist in this world to do (and no one else will do it, *can* do it, so it has to be them). characters who've determined that they are constructs bound to preprogrammed code, to a script already written for them by someone/something else, and have been operating under that mindset for so long that they don't know how to live on their own terms. characters who uphold the fate that is smothering them. can anyone hear me

[miiilowo]

Killing yourself shouldn't kill you. I should be able to die recreationally

[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

[alunaloverworld]