T.A. Creech

:: Author ::

[ta-creech]

173 words today. This scene is like pulling teeth. I think I'm just going to have to rip through it and fix it in the edits. I don't know why the Muse is so difficult to find with the pivotal scenes, but I'm gonna have a talk with Them the first chance I get about this problem.

[ta-creech]

510 words today. None of them great, but that's what the edits are for. The first Battle Grove scene is a major plot scene, and don't let the name fool you, but for some reason, this scene is like pulling teeth. I think it's because I want it perfect on the first pass. It's so emotional major and it's making me crazy that I can't just write it right from the jump. Am I the only one with that problem? I can't be. Anyone got tips for this?

[ta-creech]

105 words today. Not terrible. Not my hoped-for word count. The minimum is supposed to be 500 a day, give or take. However, I did get one banger line out of it, so I'm not real sad over the lack of words. There's always tomorrow.

This one held a touch more hunger to it, more the grit on a stone's surface than the smoothness of the River.

[ta-creech]

After a horrible, gross, epic three days of food poisoning, I wrote 101 words. Which is surprisingly more than I thought I would get. But now, onto the adulting part of my day because life.

I need more sleep. Or something.

[ta-creech]

280 words this morning. Getting into the spicy part, finally. For some reason Ash and Silver wanted to jackjaw. But we're getting there!

[theadmiralsdaughter]

Ten Ways To Support Indie Authors

1. Share their posts! Did you guys know I get twice as much views on my instagram posts just from one person adding them to their story? This helps more people see my work and gives us a better shot against the algorithm!

2. Interact with them! Leaving a comment on a post or sending them a message is a simple way to brighten their day and show them they are seen and appreciated! Tell them what you love about what they do!

3. Tell your friends! Sometimes it takes a dozen posts from an author to get a reader to even consider reading their book, but all it takes is one message that starts with "BESTIE YOU'VE GOTTA CHECK THIS OUT!"

4. Request their books at the library! Yes, you can get your favorite indie author's book to a wider audience and support your local library at the same time! Win-win!

5. Make fan content! Seeing fanart, playlists, edits, and other creations based on your creations is always encouraging. As an author, I would be honored if people loved my characters enough to make fanworks of them.

6. Leave a review! Reviews help show the author people are actually reading their book, let others know why they should read it too, and help boost visibility and community!

7. Buy their books! Obviously, the best way to support an author is to buy their books! If you already have a copy, consider purchasing one to gift to a friend, library, youth center, or little free library!

8. Participate in online giveaways & events. Authors spend a lot of time setting up giveaway events to help build hype and boost community, and by participating, you can help them and maybe claim some goodies for yourself!

9. Merch! If an author sells promo items realated to their book, it helps more than just financially! When other people see your swag, you get to spread the hype! If the author doesn't have merch maybe you can offer to help them design some!!

10. Attend events! Seeing people physically in front of you excited about your book is so encouraging, and enthusiastic fans encourage others' curiousity!

[ta-creech]

It's voice was different from the Mountain, and quieter, but clear. It stood guard over its humans, still, waiting for an enemy no longing a part of the world.

I don't know why, but I love this line. Ash showing Silver the Battle Grove is one of the high points of Act 2. And it gets spicy. Realizations to be had, angsting to be done, the speed up toward Act 3. I love this scene. And I put down more words in one go than I have in two weeks! 311. Not terrible.

[ta-creech]

Only wrote 13 words today.

I don't want to talk about it.

[rederiswrites]

Half-read a post the other day (and then got distracted) about what vegetables the poster would plant in a garden tailored to surviving food scarcity--which, to be clear, I think is an important and not at all crazy subject. Food scarcity is a possible outcome of several converging trends in the US and elsewhere--authoritarianism has led to some of the worst famines in recent history, for example, as has a rich and powerful "aristocracy" deciding that profit matters more than feeding people (ask the Irish). And then there's climate disasters, obviously. I'm not trying to be scary. I'm trying to nudge past the kneejerk reaction a lot of leftists understandably have to anything that smacks of "survivalism" and its associated hyper-individualism. The point isn't "oh god we're fucked", the point is that concerns about food scarcity are not unreasonable, and choosing to work on your (and your community's) food independence is a really good goal for those who have the resources.

That post is long gone from my dash, but I do remember it mentioning lettuce and tomatoes and corn, and me thinking that honestly those would NOT be my picks for a survival garden. Like, I want to be clear, I grow those things, and those are good things to grow! But lettuce produces almost no calories and relatively few nutrients. Corn...corn has caveats. First, it has to be planted in large blocks in order to be pollinated, because it's wind pollinated. You can't just plant a row or two. Also, if it's sweet corn, it's very highly perishable, and if it's a dry corn, like a dent corn meant for flour, it requires processing. More on that later. And tomatoes kinda combine the above problems--large, not a ton of calories, and highly perishable, PLUS they take a bit of skill to get good yields (source: me. My tomato plants always suck ass.)

I think everyone's veggie picks are going to vary wildly based on their eating habits and growing conditions. But when I think about survival gardening, I think about calories per area. That is, in a given area, with a realistic yield, how many calories you can expect to get out of a crop. Because in a survival situation, what you need more than anything is calories. Nutrients matter, but I'll be honest, if you're really suddenly eating mostly unprocessed plant foods, along with what weeds you can forage (which is quite a lot where I am), you might be doing better nutritionally than pizza and tacos. And when it comes to calories per acre, potatoes and sweet potatoes (which are not actually related botanically) are basically the undisputed kings in temperate climates.

There are a bunch of other things along those lines that I would choose to grow--beets, turnips, carrots, onions, and things less known now like skirret and salsify are the calorie-dense vegetables that my European ancestors ate before the Columbian Exchange. Everyone once again say thank you to Precolombian agronomists and farmers for potatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, squash... Or there's sunchokes, which take a little getting used to in the kitchen, but in most places they absolutely cannot be beaten for plant it and forget about it perennial food.

If you do have more space, the dry corn really is a good idea, but you need some means to grind it or nixtamalize it, and that and getting it off the cob, etc., are going to take time and energy. Another crop that takes a lot of space but has a great yield of calories and easy processing is winter squash, like pumpkins. The big advantage of those is that if you pick the right varieties, these will store for months, in their original form, if you just put them someplace cool but not freezing. You can have a hubbard squash in the garage until March and then cut it up and have food in half an hour. Also, as we all know from all the adorable zoo videos, a whole lot of animals will eat squash, including chickens.

Anyhow. There's a million things you could grow, including more nutrient dense greens like mustard or collards, herbs to make staple foods more palatable, etc. But when I think gardening for food security, I think calories.

[formerlyluckymanticore]

Reblog if you will never. Ever. Use AI in your writing.

[ta-creech]

645 words today!

I've been a little dry on words for a hot minute, but I captured them little shits this morning. What a great way to start 2026. Ash was all up in his feels for the end of the scene. I let him. I guess he's allowed.

[ta-creech]

Don't ask about the last month. This flu really kicked my ass. Anyway. Wrote 1703 words the last three days! Particularly happy with this one:

He knew what Stone was really asking. For the span of a heartbeat, Ash really was tempted to take him up on that offer. Pretend to look for Silver's path out of the Mountain. Pretend they didn't find anything. Even pretend it was an impossible request.

[ta-creech]

I had the most amazing idea for a dystopian setting. Maybe post-apocalyptic, depending on how one judges these things.

So, I was listening to ParkNotes about the control problem of AI and the idea of who's controlling the machine settled into my brain like an annoying cat. I've got too many things slinking around in my brain already friends.

Anyway, then I started listening to this essay on Ryan Holiday's lessons from the Odyssey. It was like the Muse Herself came down from on high and smacked me in the back of the head with a nail-studded Clue!Bat. The Algorithm is the Siren Song of the modern day. And look who controls the Algorithm. Who the Siren is. Extrapolate the world from where we are now to where we're headed if we can't deal with the Siren.

It's going to be a hell of a story when I write it, and a hell of a story when we live it.

And if you want to see another weird apocalypse scenario I wrote, with spicy gay romance all over, I got a couple of books here.

[ciaran]

it's great when characters don't know themselves well enough to communicate their trauma. if you ask them what fucked them up and really really manage to force an answer out of them they'll be like idk someone hit me i guess and they'll never manage to tell you what it actually was bc they don't know! they haven't got a damn clue what went wrong in their own life to make them end up how they did, where they did. they think whatever answer they've been scrapping with for all their life is just all there is to the matter. if you actually went and looked at their childhood you'd see, with great clarity, the continuity between what hurt them and what became of them but they can't see it—won't see it— it's important that they know that 1. something is wrong with them 2. they HAVE an idea of what it is 3. they are completely fucking wrong or kind of right but they're pointing at smth in the middle of a long series of events as the origin for the sake of convenience or they're mistaken or they are just like sincerely doing their best to answer the question but have no clue. they're not lying, maliciously or otherwise. they don't know

[ta-creech]

50-ish words today. Came down with a head cold, so I feel like roadkill. Ugh.

[ta-creech]

20 words today. That's all I had the bandwidth for with this head cold I developed yesterday. Ugh. Progress is progress and I'll take it.

[ta-creech]

150 words today! Handwriting this story out seems to make focusing easier. I think it might, MAYBE, be because I can type faster than I think about the way I want the scene to go and I end up with a ???? When I hit the end of the sentence. Feels like stutter stop all the time. I'm gonna stick with this and see what happens for a while. Give it a real college try.