where's the tweet thats like high value art heists should be legal and should be like a national pass time between countries like capture the flag. thats my platform
like i'd stay in museum security as a job just for that like to be on the defending team against some other country's art heist team. could be like eurovision but more fun. no bloodshed allowed no weapons u gotta use ur hands only. we should also be allowed to trade players between nations
Just because your hat is tilted aside jauntily does not prove your superiority. My wizard hat is set neatly atop my head so that it is secure against strong breezes and someone condescendingly flicking the brim
there's so much pathologizing over why enemies to lovers is a popular trope (something something the normalization of abuse something something) when the simplest and less moronic answer is that narratives thrive on irony and reversals, and there's no greater irony than characters going from hating each other's guts to loving each other unconditionally. raw thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
seeking beta readers for damen/laurent wedding fic
hello, general internet void! i have written a ~26k ~37k post-canon damen/laurent fic that i like very much and am very proud of and have polished up as far as i can on my own, so now i need to get some new eyes on it — preferably grammatically inclined ones that can help me solve its problems, but i will also accept help in just identifying them
the premise is as follows:
When Laurent set out to plan a royal wedding between two 1) men, who are 2) active ruling kings, of 3) tenuously peaceful lands, with 4) widely-known reasons to have killed, or possibly 5) still kill each other, he expected the process to come with some difficulties.
He did not expect getting his perpetually amorous new husband aroused on their wedding night to be the hardest of them.
(Or: ‘Not in front of the court,' said Laurent, as if this were unspeakably foolish, 'in front of the Council.’)
it’s a character study of laurent — half political nuances, half explicit sex (often at the same time) — with a lot of Worldbuilding and Emotions and also plenty of Absurdity
if that sounds like something you’d enjoy reading (and spotting issues with, otherwise just wait a week lol), shoot me a dm and i’ll link you to the google doc! also reblog or tell a writerly friend — i want to post it to ao3 by july 19th, and ideally i’d like to get at least five people to weigh in on which adjective works better here, whether that sentence there needs to be broken up, and what hilarious mishap could have kept damen in ios for two days longer than he had planned on. (examples of prose and tone under the cut if you’re not sure)
EDIT: if you’re seeing this in october or later, i sliiiightly overestimated my abilities, but fear not, i am still working on the fic and it is actually very close to being done, and i am very excited about it, and i will have it out by the end of 2022 i promise
(EDIT in november 2023: HAHAHA lol) (no but this time i’m actually for sure close)
(and actually would still welcome some new betas that haven’t already participated in a twelve-comment thread debating the merits of a single word and could read the new and improved version with fresh eyes lol, hit me up if you wanna join the chaos, we had a lot of fun)
for reference, here is an example of a paragraph that i am happy with:
All of which was to say, he spent plenty of time away from the duties traditionally prescribed to him as King of Vere, but leisure time — true leisure, not traveling or spying or deceiving innocent merchants into bringing down slave smuggling operations — was rare, and half the time he ended up using it as an excuse to think strategy in peace anyway.
and here is one where the rhythm doesn’t feel quite right yet:
Damen remained leaning against the wall, watching Laurent as he opened every cupboard, peeked into the bath, climbed onto a rickety chair to see over the top panel of the bed. When he ventured onto the balcony to check the walls above it and bent over the railing, Damen said, “You should put a mirror on a stick so you can check there’s nobody on the balcony below ours.”
and here is one where i just need help coming up with some details:
In itself, the sight of kings kissing in the hallways was not very unusual at Marlas; despite the many meetings they shared, much of their days were spent apart, attending to [some matter or another]. (A few months after relocating to Delfeur, even unabashedly smitten Damen had had to admit that having two kings present for [something ridiculously minor] was overkill at best and negligence at worst.)
Also, while I’m still thinking about POV and I’m a little punchy:
NO POV IS “WRONG” OR “BAD.”
Every POV choice creates a different version of a story, and some POVs are more effective than others to tell particular stories, but it’s up to the author to decide what kind of story they want to tell. If Harry Potter had been omniscient 3rd person POV, we would’ve known every secret Harry wanted to uncover before he did. If it had been 1st person from Harry’s POV, maybe more attention would have been paid to Harry’s internal life than to the world around him (which I would’ve read, but I’m 100% in it for the characters). If it had been a close 1st person Ron POV, book 2 would’ve included at least 50 pages of unintelligible ranting about spiders. Same events, different lenses.
My very favorite POV is one that I have never seen in fic: multiple 1st person. Collective “We” voice. It’s like one person is speaking on behalf of a group they have intimate knowledge of or a weird little hive mind is telling the story, and it’s fucking beautiful. (It would be perfect for kaiju POV, I’M JUST SAYING, PACIFIC RIM FIC WRITERS.)
I will also defend 2nd person POV to the death. Like you wanna talk shit about 2nd person POV, I am non-confrontational as fuck but I will throw down over 2nd person POV. 2nd person POV is perfect for shoving the reader into the shoes of a person they might not otherwise identify with, it’s not supposed to be comfortable, it’s supposed to highlight alienation and make you think about your differences, and that makes it a powerful tool for writing about identity. If you don’t like it personally, read something else, but don’t try to tell me it’s unnecessary or inherently a bad choice.
(Fic rec for excellent use of 2nd person POV: Equivalence by Introductory.)
(And for that matter, if you don’t think 1st person can work in fic, let me introduce you to Clueless, or: How I Learned to Stop Being a Selfish Prick and Love a Capsicle by withthepilot. Yes, I know it’s an Avengers/Clueless AU. It’s absolutely perfect and one of the most brilliant uses of voice I’ve ever seen in fic.)
in the things you read, do you like FLIRTING? do you like BANTER? do you like OLD EXES reconnecting and exploring LINGERING FEELINGS, thus essentially becoming WILL-THEY-WON’T-THEY even though they already HAVE? do you like MIXED GENRES, say, a ROMCOM with CASUAL REFERENCES to past SUPERNATURAL HORROR that the characters have been through? do you like COMPLICATED CHARACTERS who have done BAD THINGS while in that horror show and are STRUGGLING to LIVE NORMALLY now that it’s over? do you like GOOD WRITING that the author has poured MONTHS and MONTHS of LOVE and SWEAT and METAPHORICAL BLOOD INTO?
do you like ALL OF THESE THINGS but DON’T HAVE TIME to read a WHOLE BOOK that would explore them because of your VERY BUSY life?
then BOY, do i have the read for YOU! my new story NOWHERE ELSE TONIGHT WE SHOULD BE has ALL THAT and MORE, packaged neatly in a bite-sized 28k word NOVELLA that is guaranteed to make you SNICKER, feel WARM AND FUZZY, and briefly enter that EXISTENTIAL CRISIS that is ALWAYS just AROUND THE CORNER for ALL OF US.
read on AO3
now, i know what you’re thinking. is it technically fanfiction? sure, but you’ve never heard of the source material and it has very little to do with this anyway. and your next question: can you read this without any knowledge of said source material, Morning Glories by Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma? absolutely — as fanfic goes, this is pretty much as stand-alone as it gets.
(are there still some references you won’t get but you don’t want to commit to reading a little-known 50-issue indie comic book just to read this random fic that sounds kinda weird and you only have the author’s word you’ll enjoy? no problemo, here is a jade/ike STARTER PACK that will tell you all you need to know)
am i making this post solely because this fic is extremely niche and its built-in audience is maybe three people? why yes, yes i am, because i happen to be one of them, and i spent NINE MONTHS on it, and it’s the BEST WRITING i’ve ever done, and i will be DAMNED if i let it fade into obscurity without even trying to bring it to fresh eyes
anyway, thank you for reading. now ENJOY and TELL YOUR FRIENDS!
morning glories | T (swearing, sexual themes) | 28,000 words | romcom | future fic | basically nora roberts tribute
You would think Jade Ellsworth has it all.
She is attractive, headstrong — successful, even. A little unworldly, maybe — very single, definitely — but she wouldn’t be moving to NYC for an incredible job if she weren’t doing something right. And for the most part, that’s all true. But she also wouldn’t be uprooting a perfectly good life if she weren’t in need of a new beginning. Wouldn’t be so blasé about it if she hadn’t had to do it once before.
Truth is, she’d assumed that if she just somehow made it to her eighteenth birthday, then it would all be smooth sailing from there. But it’s been a decade now since she set fire to her prep school and all the nightmares inside it — and maybe it’s time to admit that being a veteran of Morning Glory Academy seems like a lifelong affliction. For better or worse, there’s no moving past the death, magic, and messy relationships of her youth — particularly not when the messiest of them all is about to crash back into her life without so much as a courtesy warning.
Enter Ike: wearer of scarves, player of women, destroyer of dimensions. Not the love of her life, but certainly something far more complicated.
1. I’m pretty comfortable with constructive criticism. Not just implementing it, but also sorting it into a manageable size. If someone I respect says, Stiefvater, that’s a little rocky, here’s my supporting argument, I’m usually pretty good about assessing whether I feel that’s something I need to take on. That means if some rando shouts to me on the street that I need to reconsider my life choices, I don’t internalize that. If an internet troll tells me to die in a fire, I don’t internalize that. If a guy I literally have never seen before shakes his head at my car and tells me I have no taste, it doesn’t register as information I need to act upon. If a friend brings something to me, then I start to pay attention, but the everyday slings and arrows of existing surrounded by judgment? Shrug. This is closely related to my opinion that you should like what you like.
2. I’m okay with being a work in progress. It doesn’t hurt my feelings to post something that isn’t perfect. Perfect is an optical illusion, an end of the road that is unreachable. That means literally everything I attempt will fall short of it by some measure. All I can do is try my absolute best at the moment I am in, and then judge my efforts by however good I am at a thing right then. My first published book isn’t anywhere near as good as my 13th published book. My 13th will be nowhere near as good as my 21st. Does that mean I should wait until the 21st to show anything to anyone?
2b. I might not have confidence in whatever I’m doing, but I have confidence that I can learn to be better at it. I don’t play the banjo right now, but you know what, I bet that if I had to play the banjo for an upcoming author extravaganza, I could learn. And again — I don’t have to be perfect at the thing. I can just do my best.*
3. I have a sense of humor about it. I’m a ridiculous creature. I understand what that means, looking in from the outside. You think my ripped jeans are weird, well, they kinda are. You think my car is strange, well, it sorta is. You think my music taste is outrageous? Totally is. I don’t care if you laugh. I like what I like, and I don’t care if I’m a prismacolor unicorn of a human.
3b. I’m not for everyone. I’m fine with that, too. We’re not vacuum cleaners. There’s not an objective right or wrong for us to be. We’re more like songs — and not every song is for every person, no matter how well-written or great it is. Just be the best jingle you can be and that’s good enough.
urs,
Stiefvater
*a prerequisite for all of this is that you have to try hard and be present and committed to your own life story. It’s not an incredibly popular option right now, particularly among some of my bag-wine peers, but what can I say? Life works better when you’re there for it.
what if you’re giving birth to twins and it’s the end of daylights savings day and the older twin was born first but the second twin travels back in time and is born an hour before the first twin, would that be fucked up or what.
Okay, so I'm /actually/ about to write a porn fic to AO3, and I'm interested in knowing what the difference is between the M rating and E rating. Able to enlighten me?
Mature is ‘and then they made love.’ Explicit is ‘and here’s how they did it exactly.’
To wit: mature.
He looked at the envelope, spread out before him.
God, he’d never been this hungry.
Could he be gentle enough? Slow enough? He didn’t want to damage it, didn’t want to do anything he’d regret… but no, no, it seemed the envelope wanted this as much as he did. It slipped into his hands, it folded as he asked. When it was time for more, the card was waiting, and he somehow knew exactly what to do. He moved with his correspondence in a dance as old as the mail system, and when it was over, he was smiling and the envelope was completely, thoroughly sealed.
Explicit:
The envelope waved its flap in the air slowly, gently, and he could see the faint shimmer of the adhesive traced along its fold. It was like a taunt, a dare: won’t you? And he would, oh, God, he would, lifting the envelope firmly to his lips, licking slowly at first, then faster, more firmly, tasting the envelope’s essence, the faint bitterness, the sweetness to follow—
Oh, he couldn’t help but smile at how it felt in his hands. It was so perfectly folded. Its paper was rough against his fingers, and its crossed folds shifted slightly as it opened for his eager tongue. Yes, yes…
Now the card, and his hand trembled as he lifted it, as he held the envelope, stretching it wide. Would it fit? Oh… oh, yes, it would fit, it slid in smooth and quick and filled the envelope to bursting, oh, made for each other, and he smiled in delight at how perfect it was.
He was ready. Now, now, now: with one swift movement he folded the flap over and he pressed, yes, he pressed the flap down and it stuck, God, it stuck perfectly, and he closed his eyes in bliss.
Afterwards, he stroked the envelope, and thought about addresses.
