i joke a lot about being the reason for the fast car renaissance, but this is actually so beautiful and i’m glad tracy chapman got to have this moment tonight 🥹
Do other writers ever get this like, hyper-specific dialogue exchange drop into their brains and you know exactly where these character are standing and what they’re doing and how they’re saying these words but that’s all you get. You don’t have much other context and this specific moment that exists only at this time in your headspace??
you ever accidentally create a recurring theme in your writing. you start putting together an outline for something you’ve never written before and get partway through planning, rearrange the pieces, and go “GODDAMMIT THIS IS ABOUT GRIEF AGAIN”? because let me tell you,
My greatest accomplishment of 2024 to date. Possibly the best thing I'll do all year.
("Assistant" is of course a loose general term for the relevant characters. And Csethiro is wonderful. But I'm queer, and AO3 understands my need for Csevet fic.)
You can now order "Trick Up Your Sleeve" on Amazon!! (so many thanks to @anotherwellkeptsecret for the incredible cover that I absolutely ADORE)
"Trick Up Your Sleeve" is a MM gay midlife romance about boys in a band getting back together and finding happy-ever-after. This is the first in a series revolved around the same couple settling into life together amidst the family of their rock band Swan.
Sneak preview of the beginning below the cut.
Matt Usher woke up one day to his silent, empty house. This was not an unusual occurrence. Over the past fifteen years, when Matt Usher woke up, it was usually to silence and emptiness.
What was unusual was that, on this day, Matt had nothing to do.
More often than not, over the past few months, Matt’s days had been busy whirlwinds of activity, serving as a mentor and coach and judge on the reality show Who Can Sing the Best? After years of aimlessness, the opportunity had taken him by surprise, as had the fact that it turned out he liked being busy. Now that the show was done filming and he was faced with all this empty silence all around him, a day stretching out in front of him in which nobody wanted him for anything, he felt…twitchy.
He got himself out of bed and sat at his piano and looked out over the California coastline. It was a perfect view of sea and sky that he had paid a lot of money for at one point, because it was supposed to have indicated that he had Made It. Now Matt could no longer remember exactly what he had made it for, or even what the “it” was that he had made.
Matt looked at the half-written songs he had scrawled over sheet music all over the piano, some of them songs he’d started working on literally years ago, because that was how long it had been since he had finished a song. Whenever he sat down to write a song, he inevitably remembered how easily he used to write songs, how they used to flow right out of him, how he would write multiple songs a week and they would all be top ten hits.
Of course, then he hadn’t been alone, he’d had…
Matt walked away from the piano. That seemed like definitely the wisest course of action. Better to walk away than to get mired all over again in everything he’d lost, everything he no longer was.
This was why Who Can Sing the Best? had been so great. It had, for the first time in a long time, given him somewhere to live that wasn’t the past. He’d had a present he was enjoying and it seemed like it had been so long since he had enjoyed his present.
How could he keep that going?
It took some hunting for Matt to find his cell phone because he never could remember where he left his cell phone. When he found it, he ignored all the texts because those would all be from people wanting to hitch onto his suddenly gleaming-again star: come out clubbing or go to a restaurant opening or be seen shopping in the right store. Matt knew all of these texts by heart, he’d lived all of them the first time around with his fame. The thought of going through all of them again – alone, this time – was not appealing.
But he definitely needed something to do. For too long he’d let himself wallow in silence and emptiness, enjoying the epic proportions of the sulk he was nursing, all while Patrick went off and filled his life to the brim with all sorts of things that weren’t Matt. Who Can Sing the Best? indicated that sometimes people still cared about him, even though he no longer came with a whole rock band attached to him. Maybe there were other people to find who would also care. Matt called his manager and said, “Okay. What else do you think you can get me to do?”
something about foreshadowing being more prominent the second time around reading a story but in a way that the meaning is changed forever and you can never view a story the same as you once did before. do you know what i mean.
literally so insane how you can never go back to the innocence of it all. you see all the signs coming and you know how it ends. but there's nothing you can do to turn a blind eye to it anymore. it hits you and you just have to keep going.
I love how different forms of art are all obsessed with each other. A book tries to capture the feeling of music, a painting tries to depict a scene in a book, a song tries to paint a picture. And it's always insufficient. No single form of art can encapsulate another form of art and capture the essence of it – but it tries, and its attempts are impossibly compelling. All the forms of art are in love with each other and spend so much time trying to express what makes the other kinds of art so lovely.
My enjoyment of writing, my productivity, and the quality of my work improved tenfold when I started embracing slumps and taking them as an opportunity to read everything I could get my hands on, watch lots of films and shows, go to the theatre, play games, hang out with friends, visit new places, and generally absorb life and marinate my brain in the art of storytelling.
When farmers grow the same crop too many years in a row, it can leave their soil depleted of minerals and other nutrients that are vital to the health of their fields.
To avoid this, farmers will often alternate the crops that they grow because some plants will use up different minerals (such as nitrogen) while other plants replenish those minerals. This process is known as “crop rotation.”
So the next time you find that you need to step away from a project to work on something else for a while, don’t beat yourself up for “quitting” that project. Give yourself permission to practice “mental crop rotation” to maintain a healthy brain field.
Because I’ve found that when that unnecessary guilt and pressure are removed from the process, a good mental crop rotation can help you feel more energized and invigorated than ever once you’re ready to rotate back to that project.
: A crucial part of crop rotation is that the field is let fallow sometimes. You plant what’s called a “cover crop”, which is something you don’t expect to harvest– it’s there for its roots to hold the soil in place, and often it’ll be what’s called a nitrogen-fixer, i.e. a plant that can pull nitrogen out of the air and fix it into the soil with its roots (but sometimes it won’t, sometimes it’s really just there to shelter the soil surface), and then you’ll till in that cover crop, or let the frost kill it and the stalks lie as mulch, and then you’ll rotate productive crops back into that field the next season.
It’s important, though, to understand that during the fallow period, no nutrients are removed from that ground, and nothing is expected of it. Whatever the land grows then, it keeps, and it gets tilled back in or decomposes in place, to return its energy to the earth.
We’re not allowed, in our current society, to just let our minds be fallow for a bit, to produce nothing for export, to make nothing that can be sold. But it’s part of good land stewardship, to give every field time when it doesn’t need to give you anything back.
So yes, grow and produce different things from time to time, rotate them around your mind and exercise different mental muscles, take different things from your creative processes, yes– but also, give yourself a fallow spell now and again, and let the field of your mind grow things for itself to keep, to break down and save for later.
I finished A Psalm for the Wild-Built last night (enjoyed it!) and have been thinking about how well it works as a companion read to the Murderbot series. In many ways, they're very different novels—different tones in quite different worlds—but they're absolutely part of the same conversation.
when albert camus said “the sea; i didnt lose myself in it. i found myself in it” and when sylvia plath said “if i lived by the sea i would never be really sad” and when hozier said “love, when the sea rises to meet us” and when an anonymous writer said “and yet my heart wanders away, my soul roams with the sea” and when homer said “I’d rather die at sea”
and when marguerite duras said “there is one thing i am good at, and that’s looking at the sea” and when agnès varda said “it’s important to always be by the sea. the sea is the element of love”
and when hermann broch said “those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part,” and when keri hulme said “I know about me. I am the moons sister, a tidal child stranded on land. the sea always in my ear, a surf of eternal discontent in my blood,” and iain pears said “being by the sea is like a permanent baptism; the light and air hypnotizes, and your soul is washed by vastness.”
and when julia de burgos said “the sea, the true sea, almost mine now” and when saadi youssef said “but to the sea, to this sea, i return” and derek walcott said “you want to know my history? ask the sea.”
and when e e cummings said “for whatever we lose(like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea” and when john masefield said “i must go down to the seas again for the call of the running tide is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied”
and when albert camus said “I will have always loved the sea. it will have always made everything peaceful inside me” and when chelsea wolfe said “I never was a child I was pulled right out of the sea and the salt, it never left my body” and when virginia woolf said “I live; I die; the sea comes over me; the blue that lasts” and when emily dickinson said “say, sea, take me!”
germansingergirl
2087
vaporwave
discoholicmusic
origamiaround
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
