romanticizing the grotesque

noel — any pronouns. 22. writeblr.

[phantomnations]

PHANTOMNATIONS — a writeblr intro

hello everybody. i’m noel, 22, thai-chinese, your resident pretentious linguistics student.

i love learning about languages, hoarding wips, and rambling incoherently about my characters.

i mostly write historical fiction but have also dabbled in fantasy and contemporary.

my fav tropes are morally ambiguous characters, complicated family dynamics, and found family.

MY WIPS

🎻 GHOST NOTES historical drama

In 1870s Vienna, two female composers become locked into an intense rivalry; one that soon turns into infatuation, and one that may have deadly consequences for them both.

🌃 IRON AND GOLD historical mystery

In 1920s Berlin, a disgruntled private detective is tasked with solving the murder of a young socialite and finds that there is much more to the case than meets the eye.

💫 STELLA MARIS science fiction

A woman infiltrates an upper-class satellite in the clouds to seek revenge for her wronged family and finds the truth is more complicated than it seems.

🍁 THE MAPLE SOCIETY dark academia mystery

At Mapleridge, a prestigious liberal arts college in Massachusetts, three students become unlikely friends and accidentally discover a massive conspiracy that threatens to upend the peacefulness of their tiny town.

🏺 LABYRINTH GODS high fantasy

A young woman becomes involved in a revolution to end the thousand-year reign of the despotic God-King who has subjugated her people.

🌤️ FINDING VICTORIA contemporary coming-of-age

Audrey Lam’s guide on how to excel at track, heal from the grief of losing your father, deal with your emotionally unavailable mother, and fall in love with your aloof team captain.

SOME OTHER STUFF

you can find me on pinterest @/phantomnations

i love being tagged in tag games but am slow at responding to them. i appreciate them though!

send me an ask or a dm to be added to a wip taglist!

[ryan-sometimes]

I’m not falling for the propaganda trying to tear apart the LGBTQ acronym, you can pry this community out of my cold dead hands. I love lesbians I love gay men I love bisexuals I love trans people I love nonbinaries and drag queens and kings I love asexuals I love the kinky people at pride I love all queerness get that divisive shit away from me I’m so serious

[tiffbaxter]

🧡Sweet mother, I cannot weave…🧡 My full drawing of Anglo-Saxon era lesbians for We've Always Been Here artbook along with a look at the progress. (Digital sketch & pencil drawing)

[adhdxxsdiary]

[axolotlandalite]

[themainspoon]

There's so many horror games about having to try to weed out and deal with inhuman imposters, but I want one where the script is flipped. You are something inhuman, you are an imposter, and if you want to survive you have to blend into a world that is trying to hunt you down and destroy you. You aren't human, but you must masquerade as one and infiltrate their world, or you will die.

[mixelation]

things ppl often get wrong in academia AUs (specifically ones in modern university settings with focus on graduate students & professors):

no one is spending enough time complaining about writing

hierarchy is wrong. your grad student TA is not a professor or faculty and might not even be considered an employee. that 32 year old man is not a full professor no matter how talented he is or how old you think 30+ is, and he should be talking more about "the tenure clock"

grad students only ever taking or TAing classes & never doing research or working on their thesis/dissertation. there are masters programs with no thesis component so i'm sure there are ones that have no research requirement, but you can't get a PhD only taking classes

everyone has too much money. but also if it's set in the US there's an obsession with accumulating student debt for positions that generally you would not have to take out loans for

relationship with academic advisor never sufficiently unhinged

not enough discussion of stats where it's obvious everyone only barely understands what's happening

[mixelation]

"what is a sufficiently unhinged student-advisor relationship?"

link to the article

[sensibleshroom]

"I got so angry that ISIS was disrupting the research." -> Said on record to a journalist in the actual middle of an interview.

Yeah I think that's a sufficiently unhinged academic.

[concerningwolves]

I hadn't heard anything about the new Wuthering Heights adaptation until I walked in on Mum watching Lorraine this morning and beheld. white Heathcliff. Anyway, I went down this whole rabbit hole of reading people's reactions to this but, more importantly, I remembered a brilliant short story that reimagines Heathcliff as South Asian & frames his character in the context of British colonialism.

BURNISH, BURN

"First memories are hard to keep track of, but you think yours was of fire." [cw: period typical racism, colonial violence, drinking]

Fuck white Heathcliff. Enjoy some very good Wuthering Heights transformative work that actually understands the original text instead <3

[magazinescans]

The Magic of Camelot: A Medieval Soap Opera by Christopher Varaste

Barbie® Bazaar - August 2000

[cwnerd12]

shit man this got me emotional

[mckitterick]

left: the Nebra sky disc, circa 1600 BCE, showing the Moon, Sun, and stars in gold on copper - the oldest depiction of the cosmos in the world

right: the Webb Space Telescope, July 2022, revealing thousands of baby galaxies forming in the early days of the universe - humankind’s deepest look into the sky

[thirdtimecharmed]

[fanonical]

don't neglect your female blorbos. put HER in the torment nexus. give HER some old lady yuri. ship HER with everyone under the sun

[forcewound]

one of the best things you can make a female character is really bad at interpersonal relationships

[captain-lovelace-deactivated202]

being a grad student will introduce you to file formats you never knew existed. why am I downloading a .djvu file

[captain-lovelace-deactivated202]

sure whatever download as TPS. as NEX. dude you gotta open this as a SAM file, it's a BAM file, it's a VCF. Save it as a TRE file and then open it in PAUP*. yeah there's your problem you need to save this as a POOB file it'll only work if it's POOB

[iseulcottage]

Babushcats by Selynn Lee ≽ܫ≼ ˙ᵕ˙

[sadmemegf]

translated cookies options

[necronomicon]

honestly it’s kind of upsetting how much of the autism experience is just being shamed out expressing yourself in any way that’s normal for you and learning to keep everything to yourself so you’re not shamed for being weird and then being shamed for being so quiet because it’s also weird to be quiet but if you tell this to anyone else they’ll say “why do you care so much what people think” and that’s when the ancient ape part of your brain gets ready to beat them to death

[tlirsgender]

Really the hard part of writing The Plot is making your characters make wrong turns. Especially if there's any kind of mystery involved. I will figure out how to get from point A to point B but that's not very interesting. You gotta have at least two suspects, man

[tlirsgender]

I have been a murder mystery enjoyer for years I eat whodunnits by the handful but I'm only just now working on writing My first one. I've actually said before that I would never do this because I found it intimidatingly intricate how many moving parts you need to keep track of to make it Chewy. And I was right but I'm doing it anyway

[tlirsgender]

& the thing is that once you have the formula down you can just keep cranking them out. This is why there are so many of them, they're eternally popular and supposedly easy to write. In the late victorian era especially a lot of authors just put out mystery novels to pay the bills while working on other projects they cared about more. But I'm still looking at my outline and scratching my head like "I don't knowww..."

[tlirsgender]

The ghosts of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie are holding my hands away from my keyboard desperately telling me not to do this to myself because I'll be stuck writing about that fuckass detective forever but I'm not getting paid by the word this isn't even my job. Release me

[tlirsgender]

The ghosts of mystery novelists past have unhanded me & I got a decent outline down in like a half hour after marinating my ideas for a while. I see everything now. I understand how you could just keep churning out tens of these, maybe hundreds if a series runs long enough. God damn

[tlirsgender]

[ID: a tag from @yamimana-ramblings that reads, "#share your knowledge" /end ID]

Get a decent murder mystery outline in like a half hour*

*I don't have a sense of time, your mileage may vary

Here's our Victim. Establishing scene before they die. Bonk bonk. YOU the author need to know what happened and work backwards. How do the other characters figure it out?

Enter our Detective. Doesn't have to be a cop and it's usually more fun if they're working against a corrupt or incompetent police force but that's just my personal taste

Wrong turn 1

Wrong turn 2

Wrong turn 3 (etc you can keep going)

Figured it out, what happens next is up to you. Typically Jail but doesn't have to be

Okay here's the secret sauce: every wrong turn needs to get them slightly closer to the truth. Let's say you have somebody who obviously didn't do it, that goes first, maybe don't spend a lot of time here. This is like, the crying wife that gets interviewed first. Just for example. Second wrong turn makes more sense, third etc, the circle closes around what really happened. You want to shake it a little bit, throw some crazy shit in there they wouldn't have expected but still makes sense given the earlier clues you've sprinkled through. Don't just be twisty for shits n giggles you want it to stay coherent

The thing is that there needs to be a sort of back and forth, push and pull, clues getting your Detective closer but plausibly leading somewhere else, being ruled out and getting closer again. Think like a conversation. Having Two characters is useful for this, you can have them literally talking to each other and brainstorming theories. In my outline I've marked the beats with +/- symbols to see it easier visually but you don't have to do that

You don't have to follow this formula to the exact letter but it's a good starting point, this is bones, this is how the genre works. Go forth and get paid by the word, get stuck doing this with that fuckass detective forever, have fun

[tlirsgender]

"But T'Lir S'Gender," you say. "How do I get at least two suspects if I know who did it?" You need to think about who your Victim was, who they would have known, what other people thought about them -> reasons they might have for getting Bonked. Family, friends, coworkers, etc etc

This tends to tie into class pretty heavily but the Victim doesn't have to be some rich asshole everybody wanted to strangle, that's just a Genre Staple. Maybe our Victim was poor and the system doesn't give a fuck & that's why our non-cop investigator is here. That sort of thing

Another thing is that the possible answers don't necessarily have to be separate characters, depending on how much information you have about Victim's body, if they just disappeared, etc. Maybe you're ruling out suicide, human trafficking, different institutions rather than individual people, just regular accidents, etc etc etc. Plenty of things can kill and/or disappear somebody

[vacantgodling]

BETWIXT THUMB & FOREFINGER

currently a bit insane about this wip atm so i decided to make a powerpoint intro for it. the outline is 21 pages long rn LOLLL

its not as funny or fun as some of my other powerpoint intros but trust me i am thinking fondly at all times about how pathetic sjaak is and if this intrigues u maybe poke the bear (me) about it

[vacantgodling]