Phoenix/Nix, 29, post about whatever I'm hyperfixated on. BA in creative writing - Used to go by Brazzle in the Canpake Crew if those words mean remotely anything to anyone 💛🤍💜🖤 they/he/she Gender: 1920s
Miscellaneous Writing - Writing bits with no clear categorization.
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Everyday Life
Art - I'm obsessed with making art for my own stories and making theme music so I'll lump it all into one category! And whatever story it's from I'll add the title to the end of the tags. And other random doodles.
Miscellaneous Ramblings - Memes, bad/funny jokes, random short posts, random things about my life
Reblogged Posts - Stuff that I think is cool from others' blogs.
Jewelry - I make jewelry
Archive
Or, you can keep scrolling to witness a hodgepodge of everything.
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I'm Phoenix, I'm from Utah, I have a bachelor's degree in creative fiction writing (an English degree basically). I was a Tumblr user in the golden era (2013-14) before I deleted my original blog in 2015. My old nick/screen name was Brazzle but it's been Phoenix Apprentice for a decade now. Some of my old posts may be heritage posts or at least circulated so much I nearly went insane a few times. (VBNM space bar -- IYKYK).
I'm LDS (Mormon) with a very odd relationship to the church, being nonbinary and aroace. I now consider myself half in, half out, mostly out, but my religious upbringing still means something good to me. I'm also autistic and have OCD (religious OCD--makes my life extra spicy) and have a bunch of hobbies that mostly center around writing. I also make art, music, jewelry, I got super into bookbinding for a bit but haven't done that for a hot sec, I love to get cardio and most especially spend every year training for the cross country skiing season.
People terrify me but I'm willing to make friends.
I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture.
All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line?
The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy?
Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess.
I want the fat left it.
I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence.
Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."
Psst. Are you transmasc and a visual artist, musician, and/or author? (Or an artist of any other medium!) Reblog this post with a recent work you're proud of, or drop something in the askbox if you prefer!
I want to celebrate transmasculine art this pride month.
The only rules are A. No AI generated content (you will be blocked), and B. No explicit gore or explicit sexual content, as this blog is meant to be safe for kids. (Artistic nudity & light violence are both A-OK! Eyestrain and any potentially triggering content will be tagged!)
I'm an author, and even though it's not technically finished yet I've been working on this sci-fi comedy story since I came up with the idea in 2015. It was originally going to be a webcomic, but it was such an overly ambitious project I gave up the comic part and turned it into a novel years later.
If you enjoy self-referential narratives, absurdist humor, and satire, here is the first sub-chapter under the cut. I've been formatting the chapters in bite-sized mini segments that are usually 3-5 pages long. The story is called Artificial Planet: The Novene Project and I like to jokingly refer to it as "the story where I let my ADHD run hog wild"
1.1: Girl Wakes Up from Coma, but You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!
Space is very, very big. So big, in fact, that our fragile mortal brains cannot begin to comprehend it. If we tried, they would literally implode. Seriously, I’ve seen it before. It’s ugly. Existentialism is highly dangerous and not recommended by doctors.
Fortunately for us, we will only be focusing on a small part of space.
On September 5th, 3020 (Earth Standard Years), at the beginning of the Screeching Twenties decade, Earth was invaded by aliens. It would have ended a lot worse for us if it were not for the fact that the aliens suddenly found themselves enamored with one particular human invention: swing jazz. This is why, nearly five hundred years later, swing jazz is the only thing you’ll hear at the Orbital Shopping Mall, or the Smappledroid® Smoothie Shop, the genre now blended with Trivitanian Heavy Pipestep, with the Notmusicbutjustrandomnoises genre, and more; and you'll always hear it playing at the Terrian dancing halls where they’ve invented a new dance called Flowerswing (which has nothing to do with swing jazz. It’s mostly just pretending to be a flower swaying in the wind. Couple that with the Charleston, and you’ve got a bit of a disaster). Those aliens, they just won’t let go. But we aren’t complaining. We’re too busy jiving!
In all actuality, there isn’t much to be jiving about. The current state of affairs in the Milky Way Galaxy is horrendous. The president is a joke, there’s an ancient race of primordial robot beings bent on eliminating all organic life, and worst of all—Smappledroid® Smart Blenders have increased in cost by 30%! But, um ... right. My editor just sent the first draft back to me and told me that the invading robotic life forms are actually the biggest threat right now, not the blender inflation rates. Well, she can suck a Kriiviskarian’s aft end! I do what I want! Just like this!
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Truthfully, though, those invading robots are a serious issue, and the subject of the story. That’s why I’m deciding—for myself, and not because Sharon left a red mark on the blender paragraph the size of her overinflated ego—to focus on that. To focus on the real meat of the matter, the real contents of this book. (As much as I do want to write a strongly worded letter to Smappledroid®).
It all began with a nineteen-year-old girl. By no means am I her, but if I was, I would say she was suave, good-looking, astounding, incredible, wonderful, and a genius in every way. This young girl woke up in a room one day with no memory of where she was, what she was, or who she was. All she remembered was not remembering anything. For some reason she was really, really craving some pineapple.
She looked around the room. The walls were plated with dark grey hexagonal tiles that glowed faintly blue through the cracks. It seemed like a very scientific room. There were a lot of beakers with random labels like ‘??????’ and ‘important’ and ‘DO NOT DRINK THIS IT WILL KILL YOU.’ There were also many screens. Screens are always very scientific. You can do, like, scientific things on them, and stuff. Somewhere distant, she heard the faint music of a muted trumpet alongside popping bubbles. Swing jazz, perhaps mixed with Nimphian Reefstep.
She found she was wearing a hospital gown and lying in a bed. The bed was also scientific, but for reasons she couldn’t name. It felt like it had to be scientific because of the other scientific stuff in the room, so she decided it was so. She touched her chest and found something hard beneath her gown. It was a hexagonal, green crystal, embedded in her sternum. She put a hand on her head and found a sticky suction cup attached to her temple. There were others. They seemed scientific as well. She began to pull them off. She got the vague sense that science had betrayed her once, but she didn’t remember why. All she was certain of was the odd feeling that all these scientific things gave her, especially since she was the only non-scientific thing in the room.
As far as she knew.
A part of the wall across from her bed began to disintegrate in a bout of light, and a Dulgeetian walked through the doorway that formed. If you haven’t the sense to know what a Dulgeetian is, they’re gecko-like creatures native to Dulgeet and its twin planet, Strox II. He was strangely skinny, and worse, he looked scientific. His smile was warm and friendly, but his eyes were dead, like most scientists are inside. He said to her, “Do not remove the monitors wired to you. We are tracking your vitals. You have been in a comatose state for several weeks. Do you remember anything?”
The girl said nothing.
The scientist looked a little anxious. He opened a Vortechs® Nova Holographic Interface Computer and began tapping at it rapidly. “My name is Zork. You remember your name, right?”
At first the girl thought that this was a stupid question, but then she realized that it made sense to ask. She didn’t remember who she was. She still wanted pineapples. Then she remembered a word: Collier? No, that didn’t sound right. The next word: Novene. Then two words: Rayna Novene. It sounded familiar. It also sounded really, really cool. She liked that. But she still didn’t say anything, her eyes never leaving Zork.
Zork’s nonexistent lips were tight. His lips were nonexistent because lizard creatures don’t have lips, at least, none that were relevant to the traditional human idea of lips. He licked his eyes and cast a glance at her as he kept typing.
“Novene,” Rayna said, finding her voice, as if she had just plucked it from the ground and dusted it off, as if it hadn’t been atrophying for several weeks while she was in a coma. She spoke strongly, and firmly. “Rayna Novene. Don’t remember anything else.”
“Oh, you can speak! I was worried you were permanently damaged.” Zork’s shoulders relaxed. “You can remember nothing else?”
Rayna decided it would be better to cooperate with this man if it got her some answers. He seemed nice enough, but there was something about him that she didn’t like. It was a strange feeling, not unlike the sensation of Jeristenian glorp against one’s cheek. If you don’t already know what that is, I won’t be explaining it to you.
Rayna said, “No, I don’t remember anything else. Just waking up here. Cold.” She brushed her exposed arms. The room was a few degrees below comfortable. But it wasn’t only that—it was scientifically cold, which is always colder than average cold.
Zork produced a white lab coat from a cabinet and handed it to her. A bit of worry flickered over his lizard features again, but Rayna knew it wasn’t concern for her. It was the kind of worry seen on someone’s face when they knew they were about to get into trouble with a superior. “You do not remember the accident?” Zork said, then paused. “Do not worry about that. The important thing is you are safe now. You do not need to ask anything more.”
“Accident? What was the accident?” Rayna asked something more, despite Zork’s previous assertion.
A sigh escaped through Zork’s teeth (however, Dulgeetians don’t have teeth in the traditional human sense). “A collision,” he said. “You were in a starcruiser accident. You are lucky to be alive right now. If we had not saved you, you would be dead.”
Zork’s voice was detached in a way that bothered Rayna. If he were a doctor, he would have terrible bedside manner. She said, “Am I in a hospital? It doesn’t feel like a hospital.”
“You were brought here on life flight. Currently you are in the headquarters of the IGSA’s Division of Counter-Terrorism Defenses on Retellion,” Zork said. “The regular hospitals could do nothing for you, so we took you in.”
“IGSA?” Rayna said. “IGS … You’re with the government.” Now he wasn’t just a scientific man, but a governmental one as well—doubly bad. She didn’t know why, but she felt the government had betrayed her as well as science. She was surprised she knew what the IGSA was—the Intergalactic Security Agency—and she had heard of Retellion—it was one of the Artificial Planets—but she was barely able to recall her own name. She thought about pineapples to avoid thinking about the situation, but it only made her feel worse. She really wanted pineapples.
Zork shut his computer down. “I see you need some time to process all of this. I will leave. If you need more answers later, I will be back.”
Rayna was quite okay with him leaving. “Bring me a pineapple?” she said.
Zork’s tight, nonexistent lips drew tighter. He swiped a finger across a touchscreen panel in the wall, the doorway reappeared, and he walked out. The wall materialized in a glow shortly thereafter, sealing the room.
Rayna remembered that she was allergic to pineapples.
