Hello!!! My name is Car and I write weird horror romance.
Below is a list of my most recent works and current WIPS. (Titles are links.)
Love Like Drowning:
Explicit
MM
200,000 words
Published.
Summary: Shy, isolated Gregory who is haunted by the blood on his own hands winds up the obsession of a prolific serial killer who cheerfully dismantles minds and bodies in his basement. But Gregory is just as obsessed–and he's going to make sure his captor keeps him. Forever.
Major themes: Mental health/past trauma recovery. Self acceptance.
Main relationship dynamics: freak4freak lol. Anxious x Scarily Extroverted. Consensual but not safe or sane.
How to Hurt a Fly:
Explicit
MM
??? words
WIP currently updating on ao3.
Summary: Julian doesn’t need another victim to tie up in his basement–he already has a perfectly good one at home.
But he’s never met a man he wants to kiss as badly as he wants to kill–Gregory’s special. He’s jumpy and anxious and flustered dizzy by the slightest attention–
And…
It’s really not Julian’s fault he was raised to have a strong prey drive.
Note: An interconnected standalone with "Love Like Drowning". It is the same story written from the opposite POV during the same timeframe. It can be read without any knowledge of its twin.
Red Red Room:
Explicit
MM
??? words
WIP currently updating on ao3
Summary: Dylan’s flying his usual cardboard sign (HOMELESS PLEASE HELP) at the exit to the superstore parking lot when a wealthy surgeon hands him money out of his car window like he’s trying to absolve himself.
Joke’s on him: Dylan doesn’t have the power to absolve anyone at all.
Major themes: Class issues. Poverty. Sexual repression.
Main relationship dynamic: Playful x Reserved. Age gap. Sweet-ish* relationship, dark situation.
(*okay, there's possessives and some control issues.)
Note: An interconnected standalone with "Love Like Drowning" and "How to Hurt a Fly" taking place several years after the events of those two stories. It can be read without any knowledge of the other two.
Patreon:
I'm very shy and I made this as a more private space to talk about my writing. If you're already user subbed on ao3 it'll be redundant except that I also post about the writing, editing, and self-publishing process.
All posts are free (click "join for free" at the top of the page).
Hello! I’ve loved your work Fervent Care of Dying Things for a long time, and just learned about your new book from Gatobob’s website. I’ll definitely be reading it at some point, but it brought my attention back to the fic, and I just had to say thank you for writing it. Regardless if you finish it or not (which I would love to see, but of course that’s your choice) the last few updates were a good surprise after the years, and it remains my favorite work I’ve read out there. I love the way you wrote all of the characters, and I just want you to know you’re one of my favorite authors <3
Ohh, I hope if you do read it you end up enjoying it!
It's really cool to hear that the fic had such an impression on you!!
Since several people have shared a similar sentiment about fcodt recently I'm gonna talk about the fic and what it means to me below the cut, because I don't want people to think that not finishing it means I don't care about it when that couldn't be further from the truth (I don't think you meant to imply that at all, anon, btw, I just wanna express my love for it). But in order to explain what it means to me I have to Trigger Warn for talking about actual suicide baiting/personal trauma. It's kinda heavy, don't feel like you have to read it LOL, anon, it's kinda just general babbling.
Fcodt was an important fic and fandom for me and helped me get over harassment from people in the Outlast fandom which completely shattered me for years. The goal of the people who harassed me was to get me to die (they didn't succeed) and stop writing (they did succeed in this for many years). Knowing that someone actually laughed and bragged about the thought of getting me to kill myself because of a (recovery au fix-it???) fanfic I wrote is something that still impacts me today, watching people still interact with them in fandom afterwards was harrowing - it is a deeply dehumanizing thing to experience. It didn't help that writing that outlast fic was my first attempt at reaching out to other humans in any way after directly stepping out of a very abusive childhood, only to be told I deserved to die for the heartfelt art that was coming out of me. I felt totally worthless and unsalvageable as a human being. I didn't know how to salvage myself. That Outlast fic was me trying to make sense of myself through art and I apparently deserved ridicule for that.
Now I know that communication through art can be a way to process and heal, and the biggest crime those people who harassed me committed was robbing me of my ability to do that.
Discovering Lawrence's route in btd years later totally changed things for me. The fandom was a bunch of people who all delighted in the kind of transgressive works I got told I deserved to die for merely glancing at. I felt safe to write again.
So, all that to say, when people say the fic was memorable or meaningful to them, it means a lot to me. Because writing that fic meant a lot to me. Getting to transform it into something of my own with the creator's permission was an incredibly emotional experience for me, too, and an important step for me as a writer. I think anyone who has read the new version (Love Like Drowning) can understand how deep of an emotional experience it was for me lol.
Lawrence was one of the first times I saw extreme anxiety and panic attacks depicted in a fictional character in a way that actually impacted their whole life, and the isolation and weird thought patterns that can come from that. I really wanted to scoop him up and show him it didn't have to be that way (because I unknowingly needed to scoop myself up at the time and tell myself the same thing). I couldn't manage to finagle those themes into a story with the canon characters the way I could when I looked the whole thing over and made characters specifically to handle those topics. Dissecting those canon characters and rearranging them until they fit what I was actually trying to express got out the story I was actually trying to tell.
And now I'm faced with looking back at the fic and realizing I needed to forget the themes that I was desperately trying to force on those characters and actually make a story around what actually fit those characters. I'm not sure it's salvageable now. But I'm thinking about it.
I'm totally not insulted if readers of fcodt don't like lld. Honestly I don't think many readers of the original fic read lld when I had it up on ao3? It seems like it was mostly people from my other original work Dangerous Savior and people who found it randomly in the ao3 tags who read it.
But yeah, everyone who read fcodt back when I was originally posting it or since then, I love you guys, especially if you felt seen at all by the depictions of social phobia and anxiety. You're all awesome and you relating to him helped me feel less alone.
I'm like, kinda well-adjusted now is the crazy thing. It took a long time but I'm living my best life and I'm happy and I hope everyone who related to Lawrence (or Waylon in my outlast fic) is doing well. I will never not be rooting for you.
Patreon: edit your post because it violates our guidelines
Me: Okay fair was it the murder the gore the stalking the torture or the fetishizing a panic attack
Them: hate speech
me: ??? You mean the gay character written by a gay author talking about being called a slur?
The hate speech in question:
Julian’s worst crime is being okay with being called a [censored] in his own head. We all knew something was wrong with him and I'm glad we finally figured it out.
I was literally JUST thinking about how much I wanted Sinclair's POV for LLD then I saw ur masterpost and im smiling so big YAY I live for different perspectives of the same story
Eeeee I'm so happy!! I hope you like it!! I wasn't sure if I'd be able to pull off the unhinged nature of his thoughts but I've been having so much fun.
I really love writing the same story from a different perspective. I feel like it scratches the same fanfic-itch to just spend time in a universe I'm already comfortable in. And it's a writing exercise to try and deliver the same scenes in a way that is (hopefully) new and interesting.
hikes are very good yes but a deluxe hike is when you are accompanied by a freak with niche nature knowledge. they’re like omg stop there’s a horned valerian varmint beetle here and then you both get to crouch down and look at a bug like :)
I think we need to let villains be camp again. “Ohhhhh it’s homophobic to always have the villain be camp!” Okay but it’s been like. So boring without them.
I feel like we really lost something when we started looking at writing as a reader-centric product meant to appeal to the desires of a specific audience rather than a writer-centric approach of someone writes whatever particular thing particular compels them/whatever weird thing the demons in their head want to talk about, and people out there who are also compelled, and/or relate, find that writing. A lot of discussions of writing really center around what readers want rather than a writer's exploration. Sometimes as a reader I don't know what I want. I click on a fic or pick up a book I'm not sure about but that looks interesting, and I love it. Reading what I expect to get is it's own joy, but we always need to expand our horizons and not get mad at creators for not always writing what we want/expect.
