Sarah's Blogs - Choose your own adventure! 1) @sarah-sandwich-writes: my writing blog where I share writer trials, tribulations, and triumphs! For both my original works and fanfic. 2) @sarah-sandwich: The whole enchilada. The novels, the fic, and the tomfoolery. Come watch me eat mayonnaise out of a jar in between promoting my books, raving about Spider-Man, and reblogging... basically everything. Check out my website at sarahbelisa.com and sign up for my newsletter! You can find me on AO3 as Sarah_Sandwich
Red, like my bleeding heart in your hand - Buy Red Here - 25k novella prequel (the childhood years) - Follow Nash, his sister Jo, and his best friend Teddy in Deliverance, TN as they take on bullies and grow together, only to be ripped apart before they reach their potential
Blue, like don't forget about me - Buy Blue Here - 65k queer romance - Twenty years after Nash and Teddy lost touch, they reunite at a funeral and find all of the too-big feelings from childhood are still there, bubbling under the surface
Violet, like these delights - 56k~ (revising) sequel to Blue - Jo's POV, coming of age in your 30's - A month before her brother's wedding is called off, Josephine Owens thinks her biggest challenges are accepting her return to second fiddle and making friends of her new teammates on the Vervain Creek roller derby team. So you could say orchestrating the downfall of the man stalking her family will be something of a surprise.
Woolen Hollow - Drafting Percolating Drafting - fantasy, magic systems, found family, accidental chosen one. A story about choice and that weird forest kingdom cult that thinks Midge is the chosen one
Hot Air Balloon Town (working title - percolating) - In a small town famous for their hot air balloon museum and annual festival, a young woman decides she's going to break the world record for highest altitude in an open basket. However, the ghost in town is complicating things.
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FanFiction
Spideypool (Peter Parker/Wade Wilson)
Paradise (spread out with a butter knife) - 72k - slowburn soulmates au where friendship is magic (or the one where Peter and Wade are literal soulmates but don't realize it for literal years because they're literal idiots)
The Little Barnacle - 3k - Peter panics and botches Wade's proposal by proposing first like the babbling disaster man he is. He also turned out hella aro and this was his choice.
GwenMJ (Gwen Stacy/Michelle Jones)
michelle.mp3 - 32k - Michelle breaks up with Peter and retreats to her grandma's house in the country to lick her wounds and meets Gwen, her insufferable neighbor who also happens to be the drummer and songwriter who upended her perfectly adequate life and is apparently back for more.
Gen Fics
Iron Imposter/Hometown Hero - 71k - Harley-centric, trans!Harley, canon compliant, post NWH - During the Blip, when Rose Hill was on the brink of blinking off the map, Harley Keener donned his homemade Iron Man armor and began stealing whatever his hometown needed to survive. They called him a hero, even when he pointed out that stealing ain't exactly hero work. Now, five years after the blipped have returned, things are still dire. He can't slow down. He can't take a day off. And he can't let anyone know how close he is to slipping and bringing all of Rose Hill down with him. It all unravels when Harley nabs a charity donation from under Spider-Man's nose and the hunt for the Iron Impostor begins.
Curative Kisses and Magical Mishaps - 1.7k - Tony Stark-centric - Morgan gets hurt and Tony makes it all better. Or: The one where Tony's life is so full of people who love and cherish him that I've erased Endg*me from existence and this is the canon now ✌
Parkner (Peter Parker/Harley Keener)
*deep breath*
Freak Out 'Verse - 317k - It starts with a kidnapping, evolves through a summer romance, and ends with a portal to another dimension, team dynamics, and... shit tits? am i reading this right? ...really? Yeah folks it says shit tits what the fuck
Peaches 'Verse - 90k - It starts with Abbie and Harley. It starts with leaving. It ends with Abbie and Harley and Peter and May. It ends with a room and choosing to stay.
The Distance Between (You and Me) - 29k - Harley struggles to get a grip on his PTSD while his kidnappers are still out there, the board of directors at Stark Industries are looking for any excuse to deny him his future right to inherit the company, and his "bodyguard" drives him up the fucking wall.
For the First Time, Eye to Eye - 47k - Peter and Harley have a lot of shit to work through and Harley's family reunion (while they pretend to be boyfriends of five years rather than workplace rivals), is not the time or place. And yet...
Lemon Boy - 117k - Post-Endgame (sorry) Harley takes in Peter as a roommate to help with expenses while he remodels his deceased uncle's house. Both grieving in their own way, they eventually learn to see the other clearly--through the mask and despite the barriers.
Put in the Work - 55k - Rated M - fka the nasa au, now with minimal nasa (sorry). Harley built his whole life around two things: his daughter and his career at NASA. It's nothing but bad luck that he's laid off at the same time Hazel is pushing for independence. To cope, he falls back on his usual stress-relief, hotel sex with a hot stranger, but bad luck arrives in threes and it's definitely bad luck to fall in love with your one-night stand. If only he had a friend to vent to other than his sister, his daughter, and his strange quasi-friendship with Spider-Man via twitter…
another time, a difference place (I have loved you before) - ??? - Rated M - In-progress (I'm posting as I go for once) - Endgame parkner fix it fic. Peter and Harley were together inside the soul stone. Unfortunately, neither of them remember anything and these frequent bouts of deja vu are getting weird.
Parkner One-Shots
Heart (in hand) Home (in you) - 2.5k - Harley-centric sick fic
An Insignificant Problem - 1.2k - De-aged!Peter; Fed-up!Harley
Wouldn't Dream of It - 2.3k - Harley-centric alien goo induced trip down memory lane
The Human Kind - 3.7k - Spidey and Laddie play hide and seek :) (mind the tags!)
Undercover? I thought you said under covers... - 3.7k - what it says on the tin ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Peter, no - 3.4k - Peter is an awful outdoorsman. Harley is in love with him.
Rhythm and Blues - 1.3k - Flash POV! He's stuck late at school and sees something he isn't supposed to.
No Need to Rush - 5.3k - It's simple: Harley loves Peter. Yet complicated: Peter loves Harley.
Second Chances for Second Guessers - 3.7k - Peter is a flighty little whimp afraid of falling in love
Pete, I'm Fake Drunk and Wanna Go Home - 2.9k - Peter needs a night off and Harley has a fool-proof plan to make him take one
The Devil is a Hopeless Romantic - 2k - tried to write angst. it's only okay
Completely and utterly devoid of sex appeal - 1.7k - Peter has the hots for Harley when he wears a certain outfit. Unfortunately it's his work uniform. And they work together.
Fake Romance Crap - 3.4k - sure he fake married me an hour ago, but do you think he likes me?
Apeshit - 2.1k - A Freak Out 'Verse one-shot written for the prompt: You know what, maybe they ARE tired of being nice. Maybe they DO wanna go apeshit.
adventures with hair dye and feelings — In Space! - 8.7k - 5 times Harley and Peter don’t kiss +1 time they do (in space!) Written for the combined prompts: 8) every single kiss so far has been a disaster but it's really funny and 46) don't have a one night stand with your coworker on the spaceship
Come on, take a joyride - 6.8k - 5 times Harley takes Peter for a ride +1 time Peter takes Harley
Free Pass - 9k - Rated E - a smutty New Year's Eve one-shot that got plot in it somehow...
Baseball Smut ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - 2.4k - Rated E - Baseball uniforms are sexy, okay?
Seasons of You (remember remember remember me too) - 3.8k - Peter buys his first Christmas present in five years and Harley has a lot to learn, but he's off to a pretty good start. Or, the one with mittens and canned stew.
Coming Up...
Your Mom Freaked Out - ??? - An addition to the Freak Out 'Verse that occurs sometime before the final scene of You're Freaking Out's epilogue. Harley gets blasted with temporal rays when Peter and Tony's time machine experiment goes wrong. It's just his luck that he wakes up handcuffed with Officer Benjamin Parker sitting at his bed side...
Spider-Man 4: Bring it on Home - ??? - Peter/Michelle - Sequel to II/HTH - Michelle POV (maybe with some Peter POV too--i'll decide when I actually get to writing it hah) -- Inspired by the events of Iron Imposter (Hometown Hero), Peter sets out to Boston get his friends back. Meanwhile, Michelle is trying to solve the mystery of why she and Ned have gaping holes in their memories. Ned has it worse than she does and has the therapy and medical bills to prove it, which is all the more reason for her to get to the bottom of this before his episodes get any worse. She's positive she could have solved it by now if not for the universe throwing constant distractions in her face--like the cute guy that recently started frequenting the shop where she works. And what the hell is Spider-Man doing outside of New York? One mystery at a time, Em. You'll figure it out. You always do.
We Were Gods (we were kids) - 100k~ - parkner childhood friends to estranged almost lovers to superheroes fighting on opposite sides to reluctant allies to lovers for real this time (this is the OG OG Blue like don't forget about me, back to its fanfic roots)
"I have never seen a cat that showed affection/love for it's owner"
is the pet ownership version of
"I don't believe in Female Orgasms they don't exist, after all, my wife has never had one"
When I was in therapist school one of my profs said, "A lot of trauma needs 10 or 20 years before it's really ready to be worked through. Maybe longer." And at the time I was like: Oh Shit. I planned to be over my trauma and all better by the time I graduated!
Anyway, that was 10 or 20 years ago and jesus fuck, she was right.
One of the most popular theories of trauma says there are three steps.
Escape the trauma and find safety.
Process the trauma.
Consolidate the trauma.
Sometimes this can be a relatively quick process. If you get into a car accident while turning left in a busy city street, you might get trauma symptoms that cause feelings of fear and anxiety when you're driving your car, or travelling by car through a busy city.
"Finding safety" would mean learning to handle your anxiety and fearfulness by re-training your body to seek calm, even when reminded of the trauma. This might include things like breathing or muscle relaxation exercises that actually affect an anxious brain and help you stay centred, as well as slow exposure to situations that are stressful and traumatic so you learn to tolerate them again.
"Processing the trauma" means to look back at what happened that has given you significant psychological symptoms, and re-process those memories and the lessons you took from them so they are less damaging or hurtful. That might be revisiting your memories of the accident until they aren't so painful to think about, or it might be working to be more comfortable with driving again.
"Consolidating the trauma" means that when you've settled those memories, you take your new, healthier understanding of yourself forward into your life. That might make you a more cautious driver, or cause you to be more mindful and value every moment because you've seen how quickly your life can change. It is what you make of it.
When you try to do these steps out of order, that's more of a problem. If you want to dive straight into revisiting your memories of something that happened, but you have no defense against the panic attacks and nightmares that remembering causes you, you're not safe, not so far as your brain thinks. Your brain experiences raw memories of trauma as though it were still happening all around you. You can end up even more traumatized than before, so that even seeing a picture of a car makes you feel like you're back on that street waiting to turn left.
If a trauma is particularly old, complex, or strong, it can take a long, long time before you actually feel safe enough to go back into the memories that haunt you most. That's especially true if you're still in a situation that feels threatening, like if it's your job to drive around downtown. Or in other situations, if your abusive parent is still alive and in your life, or if you're still a member of the group or club you were abused in.
Even with our best therapies, like EMDR and DBT, it can still take years to reach that place of safety. Like my prof said, sometimes it's a decade. Sometimes more. I'm almost 40, and this week I finally felt safe enough to open up a file of memories that happened when I was 4. But until you reach that place, it's really hard to unpack the trauma and look at more complicated questions like, "Are the assumptions I made back when that happened accurate or useful?" or "Is it beneficial to me to keep being afraid of this kind of situation in the future?"
Also, about this process of finding safety, and how it can take so long. There's this bit from a Cheryl Strayed/Dear Sugar article that I have been living by ever since I discovered it maybe a decade ago, where she recounts having to give advice to a teenage girl at the school she works for, after they've learned that none of the government services that could get her out of her deeply shitty life have the budget or inclination to help her. It's brisk and a bit raw, but for me, it has been the permission I needed to fight like hell.
I told her that escaping the shit would be hard, but that if she wanted to not make her mother’s life her destiny, she had to be the one to make it happen. She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.
Just because I wasn't deconstructing the shit that happened to me when I was 4 for the past couple decades, it doesn't mean I wasn't working on my own healing. I did all the work that got me to here and now.
Also this bit from Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold:
You can't solve problems by running away from them, it was said, and like the good child she had once been, she had believed this. But it wasn't true. Some problems could only be solved by running away from them.
say what u want about the manscaped ads I know they are shit, all of them but the “evil, sinister, malcontent, balls” one puts me into fucking hysterics actually
No the person who tweeted this made me laugh so hard the other day bc people were trying to correct them and they edited their shadow on picsart to keep the bit going
Didn't even know this post was moving till it hit my dash again, I put it in the replies too but it is called a "chompsaw" and it's by Chompshop
They've got all kinds of patterns and such on their site for different creative projects, it does appear to be limited to cutting cardboard so if you want to do wood you will need something beefier.
“The plates on this car are stolen,” Officer Ganshyn said. My face must’ve twisted in disbelief because he continued, saying they weren’t sure whether the car itself or just the plates were stolen. This made absolutely no sense. Car companies keep meticulous track of the fleets they loan out to the media. The vehicles all have special manufacturer or dealer plates that are logged every time one enters or exits. The officers eventually ran the Range Rover’s VIN, and it came back clean, but in their view, the plates were definitely stolen.
Before I could even process that, another officer dropped the big surprise: they’d actually been tracking me around town for days via Flock cameras. But they kept losing the trail, so when a camera alerted them that the Range Rover had been spotted turning into Kohl’s that morning, they quickly set up their ambush and waited for me and my wife to walk out of the store and get into the SUV.
[…]
One of the officers pulled out his phone, opened the Flock app, and showed me two photos: a wide shot of the Range Rover going through the intersection and a zoomed-in shot of the New Jersey license plate, which clearly reads 34 10 DTM and says VEHICLE MFR along the bottom. Critically, the number 10 is in a much smaller font than the rest of the tag, which is the non-standard structure New Jersey uses for manufacturer plates.
[…]
The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.
As we all stood there shaking our heads, including my wife, who was finally allowed to join me, I connected the final dot. A lot of vehicles in JLR’s media fleet have a New Jersey manufacturer plate with the same alphanumeric structure—34 ## DTM—and Officer Ganshyn observed that meant it was now a nationwide issue. Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock, any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen. In fact, four other 34 ## DTM cars were being tracked around Minnesota that week, according to Officer Ganshyn. I was just the first one to get nabbed. The only way to stop it would be for the LAPD to correct their initial report and update Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was now racing to make happen following the phone call.
Still, he warned me to drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, I’d probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”
Look I know this is a scientific publication but you don’t understand— we need to include milk and cookies in the photo. We have to. Otherwise the science suffers
Every now and then I mention this, but if you have Netflix you can watch "School of Chocolate", where he teaches people how to do this kind of thing. You get to see him carefully explain how to do it and show the process, and then you get to watch a bunch of people figure it out and try to learn stuff that is, objectively, quite difficult. High-level pastry chefs fully shocked out of their skins at the demos and struggling through the learning process.
From these videos it is sometimes easy to think that either it's all an editing trick or that it's magic, but that show will show you how it is done, and how hard it is, and how incredibly, incredibly good at it he is. And he's a good teacher, and kind. It's really lovely.
did i tell y’all that one time when my friends and i were making a joke mockumentary about a fake cryptid, my sibling and i got into a really bad hospitalizing car crash and instead of delaying it we just decided to film in the hospital and also convinced my mom and dad to play roles in it as well?
