#aspen writes

[rayneing-on-your-parade]

The Colors That Haunt Us

paint that should have dried by now grief in the walls a house remembering too much beauty that stains longing in the wrong light the things that follow us after we leave

[rayneing-on-your-parade]

i can finally stop calling it “the project”

my upcoming queer gothic novel is officially called:

The Colors That Haunt Us

it’s about art, grief, obsession, haunting, queer longing, and the kind of beauty that asks for too much

[rayneing-on-your-parade]

very excited to be getting closer to the point where i can stop saying “the project” and start saying its actual name

which feels small, technically, but also not small at all

[rayneing-on-your-parade]

one of the fastest ways for me to know a title is wrong is that the story starts resisting it

everything feels slightly off until i find the one that actually belongs to it

[rayneing-on-your-parade]

hidden names, old spaces, dangerous beauty, and the kind of queer longing that turns every room into a confession

[rayneing-on-your-parade]

preparing a book for the world before i can really talk about it is such a specific kind of feeling

like okay, this is becoming real, this is happening, this is moving closer and closer to being seen, and i am still mostly just sitting here going well. interesting. terrifying. good.

[rayneing-on-your-parade]

apparently i can now say that i am in the final stretch of publishing a novel, which is a very strange sentence to type

not sharing the title/cover/date yet, but there is a lot moving behind the scenes right now

also, if you want a more process-y companion to that, i wrote a blog post about revision: https://www.aspenrayne.com/post/what-i-look-for-in-revision

[rayneing-on-your-parade]

current draft energy:

fog paper candle smoke longing the sense that something needs to be cut so the rest of it can breathe