One Page, Every Day

[pageadaytale]

Hi. My name is Moth. This is a sideblog for my writing.

My fiction has recently moved; you can find it here.

I also review books I read throughout the year. My reviews are currently here.

Welcome. I hope you enjoy it.

[archipithecus]

softshell and hardshell books

paperback and hardcover turtles

[captainjonnitkessler]

People will be like "queer lit is struggling! Here's a list of queer book recommendations!" and it's twelve of the most sickeningly twee books that proclaim to be for adults but are written at a young YA level and which all think that "it's queer!!!" is a suitable replacement for good writing and interesting characters

[captainjonnitkessler]

Although with that said @wearethekat and @scattered-storyteller recommended me Some Desperate Glory, which I recently finished reading and it fucking rocked. Had me absolutely hooked the whole time despite the fact that I don't particularly like sci-fi.

So I guess the lesson is get your recommendations from beloved and well-trusted tumblr sources and not from randos posting "queer reading lists"

[wearethekat]

If you liked Some Desperate Glory, I'm sliding Emily Tesh's other novel, The Incandescent, over the table to you. Just as good, except about a very tired forty-something bi woman teaching teenagers at a magical school. There's so much excellent queer SFF being published right now, and I swear actual number of sickeningly twee books is quite small.

[logarithmicpanda]

Jumping on this with apologies because I totally agree on Emily Tesh and would love recs of more sapphic books that do not fall on the sad purview of "only one personality for two MCs"

And please no Locked Tomb. I've read that. I am among the unlucky few who just think it's fine.

[wearethekat]

Yeah, I think a lot of sapphic books published right now are either cute modern romcoms or gritty SFF epics with less of a focus on the relationship/romance. Unlike m/m, there seems to be fewer books that fall into the middle ground. However! There are still some I'd recommend:

Lady Eve's Last Con, Rebecca Fraimow. Romance about a woman running a con in space who accidentally falls in love with the mark's sister.

The Alpennia books by Heather Rose Jones, starting with Daughter of Mystery. Less fantasy and more alternative historical fiction. She's the KJ Charles of indie sapphic historicals and I like her books a lot.

Idolfire, Grace Curtis. Epic fantasy roadtrip novel tightly focused on two women who have a minor romance arc.

Call Me Traitor, Everina Maxwell. Okay this one doesn't come out until October, but I loved their Winter's Orbit and I think this is going to be good.

The second book in Freya Marske's Last Binding series, A Restless Truth, is f/f and excellent. More fantasy romance leaning.

[wearethekat]

AH AK Larkwood's The Unspoken Name, that's what I was thinking of.

[logarithmicpanda]

That one I've read and adored! :D

[rathayibacter]

sometimes artists worry if their art is actually capable of making the world a better place, or if its all just wasted effort. what you need to remember is: all art is evil, and the sole aspiration of the artist should be to maim as many onlookers as possible.

[maddie-grove]

A lot of people genuinely do hate or dismiss romance novels because they think all sexual frankness in fiction is immoral and harmful, or because they think women (and only women) are too stupid to know fiction from reality, or because they think it’s gross and laughable for women (especially ones they don’t consider fuckable) to have sexual desires, or because they automatically assume that anything popular with women is inferior, or because they only care about fiction being formulaic or light entertainment when it’s something women like. This doesn’t mean that every romance novel is great and deep and progressive, but these people aren’t coming from a good place with their criticism and they don’t deserve a pass.

[satyriconmp3]

utilising the gift of imagination to hallucinate moments of tenderness between fictional people

[elbiotipo]

I think the worst kind of tags I got in that post with the stupid Tolkien and CS Lewis tags (you know the one) was those that implied that Tolkien used the concept of LOTR being a fictional translation to "avoid" explaining things. First of all, as if Tolkien would use any excuse to be lazy about WRITING of all things, he was using it to make his story feel more real, more rich, he was trying to build myth and he knew how to do it in a way few people could.. Segundo, Francia, and third, that's called narrative framing, it's been used since ancient times and it's something I don't even feel qualified to even talk about because I'm sure people have written entire papers on it.

Just the idea of Tolkien being lazy. Goddamn.

[elbiotipo]

No, actually the worst thing were those tags that said something like "I don't know where coffee or cellphones do and I'm sure OP doesn't" because fuck you, some of us actually are interested in how the world works, do you think things appears in your supermarket out of nowhere?

[elbiotipo]

No, no, actually, the worst thing is when someone said "Asimov is like Tolkien" and, I quote "Heinlein is the wheeeeee space opera guy". Heinlein. Fucking Heinlein being the wheeee space opera guy. The guy who dedicated whole pages to explaining how the technology and society of his worlds worked and made whole books on that premise to the point I think he was a hardass. Heinlein would burn your book if you didn't explain how the propulsion system of your spaceship worked.

Heinlein would not say "wheee space opera" ni de casualidad. Goddamn.

[elbiotipo]

No, no, no, actually the worst thing is all those tags that say "I'm like C.S. Lewis" oh you mean you're writing heartfelt, profound fiction with mythological themes inspired by your religious beliefs and your complex relationship to them? "I'm like CS Lewis I don't have to explain anything it's just magic xdxddxddxd" oh okay, la re concha de tu madre entonces

[elbiotipo]

No, no, no, no, actually, the worst part of that post was all the people telling me I haven't heard about "suspension of disbelief" or "don't like don't read". Yes, if your story just has generic knights eating potato stew with no thought at all at the society they live in, I will not like it and I will not read it. Thanks.

[elbiotipo]

No, no, no, no, no, the worst thing is when people tried to make a sick burn at me saying I should just read encyclopedias. Yes, that's what I like to do. Yes, there are whole fictional encyclopedias to read out there, it's a thriving and fascinating genre. Not my fault you don't know about them.

[elbiotipo]

No, no, no, no, no, no, the worst thing was that one that said I caring about potatoes and coffee in settings as such was just nitpicking like the people who complain about people of color in fantasy, when most of that post was actually ABOUT why non-european people are not represented in fantasy and science fiction to the point that their contributions to the world and customs are completely erased. And when I tried to answer them they blocked me.

[elbiotipo]

[whereserpentswalk]

Everyone says they don't want to worldbuild but at the same time everyone hates reading things which aren't properly worldbuilt. Like, if you want to have readers take your world seriously (which is basically a requirement for taking your characters and themes seriously) then you have to take it seriously.

[prokopetz]

The author's poorly disguised fetish

The author's proudly displayed fetish

The author's fetish you're pretty sure they don't realise they have

The author's fetish which they're firmly convinced everyone has and is just pretending otherwise

The author's non-sexual special interest which just sounds like a fetish because of their habitually unfortunate phrasing

The fetish the author is making a well-meaning effort to cater to in spite of clearly not understanding it themselves

The author's fetish that never quite makes it into the text because they keep getting sidetracked by the requisite worldbuilding

The author's utterly pedestrian sexual preference which the text treats like a bizarre fetish because they've got shit to work through

The author's seemingly innocuous recurring trope they're going to have a personal revelation about ten years down the road

The author's fetish you missed on a first reading because it's so far out of pocket, it never occurred to you that you could sexualise that

[butch-tradwife]

For everyone who ‘used to love reading’ but now hasn’t finished a book in years, you CAN get it back. Genuinely start bringing a book (preferably short and either fiction or a non fiction topic you already really enjoy) everywhere you go and when you have 5-20 mins waiting for the bus or at the doctors office or mechanic or whatever, get out your book and read it! You don’t have to finish it quickly or even read it often but it is so good for your brain and fun to get into the habit of reading more (and replacing being on your phone for those moments). Source: I read 0 books in 2023 and I’ve read 12 in the first 4 months of 2026

[velvetcloak]

[scarletjedi]

Can the written form be Computer-Rendered Artifical Prose?

[brennacedria]

CRAP is crap no matter the format

[recurring-polynya]

I am re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness and unfortunately, my brain is too rotten for this, because all I can think about is an alternate timeline where the girlies got absolutely sauced on this book and instead of inventing the Omegaverse, people just wrote Kemmering AUs instead.

to be clear, Ursula K. LeGuin would hate this

[recurring-polynya]

if you're not into 70's feminist sci-fi, it goes like this:

on the planet Gethen, everyone is both biologically and socially androgynous for 21-22 days out of a 26 day cycle. on those other days, you go into kemmer. If you go into kemmer by yourself, nothing really happens except you go horny-nuts. however! if you're with someone else who is in kemmer, one of you will become male and one of you will become female, and you spend the rest of the time fucking respectfully, because this is an Ursula K. LeGuin book. There is no real rhyme or reason to which gender you become--it can vary from kemmer to kemmer. If you get pregnant, you stay female through the pregnancy and nursing; otherwise you go back to being gender-neutral for the rest of the month. You can get married (vow kemmer) and always do this with the same person, but there are canonically also fuck hotels where you go have orgies with whoever else is hot to go, if that's what you're into. lineage is traced down through babies that came out of your own body.

i cannot emphasize enough that all of this is written in the absolute least horny way possible.

[iwritesometimes]

written in the least horny way possible

EXCEPT!!! in her short story "Coming of Age in Karhide," which might?? be the horniest thing she ever wrote, and expands on Kemmering Lore in such a jubilant and sensual way that you really REALLY start to understand just how much the reason Left Hand of Darkness is so terminally unhorny is because of the massive stick up narrator Genly's ass.

(well that and the two stories were published 26 years apart and not only had Le Guin presumably grown and expanded as a person in that time, but the landscape of science fiction publishing had also. like i cannot begin to stress how drastically un-horny most sci-fi was in general in the mid to late 60s and how much the stuff that WAS horny was so entirely dominated by men's fantasies of futuristic alien babe sex and universal free love (HEINLEIN!!!) - Le Guin was the first woman ever to win the Hugo Award and only like the fifth or sixth woman ever nominated in over 15 years of the award existing, so women's perspectives on sexuality in sci-fi verged on nonexistent in 1969, which i am convinced is part of why a book so prominently about sex and gender is so shockingly clinical about it 98% of the time and the main human character so terribly retrograde in his outlook, at certain moments.

though that other 2% is the tent kemmer scene which, sorry, but that is written with such tangibly agonized pining and shimmering, barely controlled want that it consumed the rest of the entire book's lack of horniness for me and left me a shell of a person. so. take that for what you will!)

[phleb0tomist]

he would not fucking say that, but with disability.. he would not fucking be able bodied. sick n tired of characters walking away from multiple life changing injuries without a scratch. let’s get some natural consequences in here.

give that knife/sword fight survivor nerve damage. give the character who was shot in the gut a stoma. give that fire survivor lung damage and an oxygen cannula. give that leg injury survivor a cane. give that starvation survivor gastroparesis. give that spinal injury survivor a manual chair or powerchair.

while we’re at it, give your characters congenital disabilities too, just because. give them intellectual and development disabilities. give them acquired and postviral illnesses. dare to make somebody bedbound. for me.

[what-even-is-thiss]

So many protagonists just get dragged around and thrown into dangerous situations with no warning while nobody tells them anything and expects them to act like they know things already and it stresses me out so much it’s like working at Walmart all over again

[what-even-is-thiss]

Most chosen one protagonists wouldn’t last a day in the women’s and infants section.

[sasha-on-the-side]

Been talking about this with friends so I present to you, the cursed spectrum of media literacy

[i-might-be-vanny]

Added a Y axis from the notes

[antlered-vixen]

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."

[mortalityplays]

I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter was one of the best works of sci-fi of our generation and one of the best works of transgender fiction ever written, and there are world renowned authors who still have successful careers after they publicly assassinated the nascent woman who wrote it. I don't think they should ever know peace.

[mortalityplays]

Isabel Fall is the patron saint of works unwritten and art unmade by a culture that cannot tolerate trans women

[mortalityplays]

I think this constantly and then I get angry for thinking it, because trans women should not have to be martyrs or saints to animate our politics and our art. that work should have been her debut, not her epitaph. I should be moved by her career, not her absence. I could spit.

[mortalityplays]

read it again

[goldensunset]

has anybody else noticed that the classic sci fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus features a Torment Nexus? that’s pretty problematic of the author

[firestorm09890]

the main character eventually recognizes the torment nexus is bad but by that point I had already stopped reading the book because I don't condone the torment nexus, the narrative really should've condemned it outright :/