NMZ | Fiction Author & Poet

Author of DEERSTALKER, a supernatural horror novel ✨just a feral gremlin peddling stories and obsessing over the moon 🌙✨ queer | she/her | obsessed with Poe

[poetmoongoddess]

Debut novel: DEERSTALKER

Something is stalking a small Bavarian village while war rages throughout the land. A lost traveler comes face to face with what haunts it.

Steeped in the rich history of seventeenth-century Germany, Deerstalker is a supernatural horror story entwined with a tantalizing LGBTQIA+ romance.

Published by Indigo River Publishing

Pre-orders are available now (linked below) and the book is set to release in print and eBook on April 15th!

Books-A-Million

Bookshop

Barnes & Noble

Walmart

And more retailers. The full list is on Simon & Schuster's website.

[thatdisasterauthor]

I think the thing that annoys me most about AI on a personal, day to day, level is what it has done to grammar checkers. If you've never done a lot of editing, or used to 5+ years ago but haven't really in the last couple years, I can't even begin to describe how fucking BAD this shit has gotten. And as an author it is EXHAUSTING.

I just want to catch spelling errors and accidental double spaces and repeated phrases and whenever I use the wrong too/to or affect/effect and shit. But no. They've shoved AI up the ass of every grammar checking software out there and now they all fucking suck and make the most random, obnoxious, nonsensical suggestions.

And yeah, I can ignore all the times it's trying to get me to cut out any semblance of my own voice, or shove things into the wrong tense, or make the most random suggestions on comma usage. But if it's getting all that WRONG, what is it just straight up missing that I SHOULD be correcting? What real spelling and grammar errors are still lurking in there?

[thatdisasterauthor]

"Use Libre Office."

I get why people keep saying this (and other versions of it like "Use Adobe alternatives" and "Use Google product alternatives."). But here's the problem: I do not create in isolation. Even my own 100% personal projects are getting sent to other people whether it's editors or printers or beta readers and unless every single person in that train is using the same products, things can get wonky.

Libre Office and Word handle formatting differently on the back end, which can completely break documents if you move them back and forth between the two. So if I write in Libre Office but my beta readers are still using Word, when I send them a manuscript for review there's a good chance things won't look right and my beta reader will not actually be reviewing what I sent them.

Industry standards are industry standards FOR A REASON. Having everyone on the same workflow can be crucial to getting things done effectively and correctly without creating a lot of extra work. And those things are not going to change overnight, as much as we might want them to.

[thatdisasterauthor]

:| :| :|

Yeah, Word, let me just leave this whole chunk of dialogue without the closing quotation marks. That's the thing to do. How dare I have two punctuation marks in a row. It's not like that's how closing quotation marks fucking work.

[thatdisasterauthor]

I am going to light something on fire.

[thatdisasterauthor]

And you know, for young writers, this has got to be so detrimental just from the perspective of opening your document and seeing a million corrections that, frankly, don't need to be there. If you're a young writer you're likely not going to have the background knowledge to know what is and isn't a good suggestion, you're just going to see a document that makes it look like you made every mistake possible so clearly you must be a terrible, stupid writer and should just give up.

[queerliblib]

Hot people support queer libraries. It’s true, we read a study about it. And every $300 your team raises in our Give Butter Pride Fundraiser just makes you hotter and hotter (plus puts your book choice on QLL’s shelves).

Click to start levelling up immediately! https://xqa.onlypult.me/j7Qe

[luna-azzurra]

Some writing advice I will never give up:

Your characters are allowed to be bad people. Your story is allowed to have no moral lesson.yyour ending is allowed to be sad. The villain can win. The good person can do something unforgivable. The lovers can destroy each other. You are allowed to write the thing that no one asked for and everything that everyone told you doesn’t work and you are allowed to not explain yourself.

It’s your story. Burn it down if you want to.

[an0neemouse]

Two things absolutely changed my life as a writer. You ready?

One- as OP said, your characters can be bad people, they can do bad things. There doesn't have to be a reason or a moral. You can make them bad if you want to. No other reason needed.

Two- it doesn't have to be good, it just needs to be written. On my last book i literally wrote the words "dumbest version" on the top of the page because I had seen some advice to do that. It changed everything. I stopped trying to make it perfect, I just tried to make it. Period. Full stop.

And honestly? Defiance is the best writing I've ever done. All because I let my characters be bad and I gave myself the freedom to write it badly.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[corpseprize]

the reality of being a writer

[pintsandparapets]

A scrapped illustration for Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892).

[luna-azzurra]

Something nobody prepares you for is that the better you get at writing the harder it becomes. beginners write freely because they don't know enough to know what's wrong. then you learn. and suddenly you can see every single flaw in real time as you're making it and you have to write anyway while your own brain is in the corner going "that's a weak verb. that transition is lazy. you've used that word three times." getting good at this is mostly just getting better at ignoring yourself.

[helenvaughans]

[itsmistybitch-deactivated202605]

These posts are sisters

[lierdumoa]

[luna-azzurra]

Genuinely think the most underrated skill in writing is knowing when a scene is done. not perfect. done. there's a version of every scene that keeps going because you're scared to leave it, scared it wasn't enough, scared the next scene is harder. so you keep adding. one more line. one more beat. one more little moment. and the scene dies from it. it needed to end three paragraphs ago and you just kept talking because you didn't want to face what came next. same as real life actually.

[luna-azzurra]

Mirror neurons are the reason you cry at a funeral for someone you never met. your brain literally cannot tell the difference between watching grief and experiencing it, it just runs the program. and writers who understand this are playing an entirely different game. you don't describe the sadness. you put the reader in the body that feels it. the mirror neuron does the rest. you're not writing emotion. you're building a trigger for theirs.

[luna-azzurra]

Writers have two modes and they are "i haven't written in three weeks and i am rotting from the inside and everything feels wrong and i don't know who i am anymore" and "i wrote for four hours straight and forgot to eat and it's dark outside and when did that happen and i feel like a god" and there is nothing in between. no chill. no medium setting. just famine or feast and a very confused nervous system.

[existential-celestial]

“At midnight, in the month of June, I stand beneath the mystic moon.”

— Edgar Allan Poe, from “The Sleeper,” in The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

[quietwingsinthesky]

the Relationship Ambiguity Zone™️ is a beautiful place to be. safe place to put your characters. put all characters into Relationship Ambiguity Zone. is that guy your mentor or your dad? Ambiguous!!! are you friends or enemies? Ambiguous!!! is it romantic? is it platonic? is it sexual? Ambiguous!!!!!!! never categorize anything ever in the Relationship Ambiguity Zone. just make them fucking weird about each other.

[calvinandhobbes]

she let me hit cause i support my public library

[lgbtplus-literature]

Some places to help you find your next read:

Indie Book Directory – directory for books that are indie published

Indie Bookstack – catalogue of books that are indie published

Indie Author Fan Club – for indie bookshops in Australia, UK and Ireland, Canada, and America.

Disability Rep – for books with disabled characters written by disabled authors

LGBTQ Reads – for trad published books with LGBT+ characters (also on tumblr)

Trans-cendent Tales – a spreadsheet of books with trans characters, both trad and indie

Aro and Ace Database

Low and No Romance books

I also enjoy taking part in challenges on StoryGraph such as:

Queer Stories Across Time

Duck Prints Press 2026 Queer Book Challenge (time sensitive)

Children’s Classics

Historical Fiction by Century

Trans Reading Challenge 2026 (time sensitive)

Read Your Way Around Ireland

I’m always open to recommendations (self recs welcome!) and suggestions of other lists to find books. I particularly enjoy queer and indie books!

[pangur-and-grim]

Queer Books and Authors are at a Breaking Point

Authors, agents, publishers: every part of the industry is seeing the strain of five years of escalating anti-LGBTQ censorship.

[pangur-and-grim]

if you'd like to show support, here are some upcoming queer books:

When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story about two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.

This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.

and then here's a list of 26 queer books by Black authors set to publish this year, and a 10 upcoming books by trans authors. if you want to fight back against queer censorship, use your wallet! or (if that's not an option) you can contact your local library and ask them to stock a copy.