#captain swash

[marnz]

fort gorges, maine

[marnz]

🗣️ let’s gooooo!!!!

[marnz]

Swash - let's be mediocre :)

hello! swash - let's be mediocre is what I have for the prequel of the court intrigue fantasy series I've been writing. It's about Captain Swash, grizzled and traumatized war hero turned ship pilot, being asked to get involved in politics and then later to rescue a little kid for political reasons. this project features: boats, court intrigue, unlikely political alliances, the sea, dogs, mental health. when i started writing this i was simply not doing well and i hated everything i had ever written. bad times! but i still wanted to write, so I decided that i would try to write and just. let it be silly and bad. eventually i stopped working on it and started writing litfic short stories instead. here's the first couple paragraphs lol. thanks for asking <3

The past will always follow you home. This was why after the war, Captain Izobel Swash did not go home. Instead she went to the desolate coast of Riparia and joined the Toothriders, pilots responsible for steering freighters through the most dangerous stretch of water in the world–where the Maggander River met the Silver Sea. Not in a spreading delta but in concussive force. Not the embrace but the devouring. It seemed to Swash the whole world was violence, violence met and violence answered, and every day she watched the Maggander open wide, shoals emerging from the water like fangs, and thought: perhaps this is the day I die. 

Because she was an expert on violence, on climax, on the high pitched ringing of a sword fight, a sound that never ended but remained as your memory took it and stretched it until it was a high pitched drone; a roar. And it was the roar she heard now as she hung suspended by one hand–her shield hand–from a rope ladder swaying over the side of a freighter. 

“CLIMB!” Commander René Serac’s voice cut through the roar. “SWASH! CLIMB!”

Yes, she must climb, must grab hold of the rope. Her shoulder, much abused during the war, screamed in pain. But as a twenty foot swell rocked the boats together and drenched her, Swash looked down at the water being squeezed between two ships and thought about letting go. 

It’s not failing, it’s a tactical retreat, her cousin Warrick would have said. An appeal to reason. But Warrick had been dead for seven long years and Swash had never mastered letting go.

The freighter rolled. Swash and the ladder slammed against its scarred side, and Swash shut her eyes as a wave broke over her. When she could breathe again René was still yelling. Everyone was yelling–the sailors above her, her fellow Toothriders below her, and the water most of all. Swash had grown up listening to the sea, the hiss, the rush, the heave and boom and slurp and gush of a thing certainly alive, and she tried to focus on it now, trying to swing her body so she could grab onto the ladder with her other hand.

“SWASH! CLIMB!”

Sometimes it was hard to remember that when people said Swash they meant her, not any of the other dozen odd members of House Swash that were in the Toothrider ranks. It was now how she thought of herself, too–the singular. The survivor of an event so unlikely, so indescribable, that it could be nothing more than a mistake. And now she did feel something, something that could not be doused by the coldness of the sea, nor purified by any flame.

[marnz]

For the fic asks 👀🤗🤲 :)

hi fey!! thank you 💜

👀 Tell me about an up and coming wip please! wow thank you for asking. but the truth is, oh my god...i really am writing a teen wolf fanfic in the year of our lord 2022. it's hurt/comfort and it takes place 8 years after canon. stiles is in law school in seattle and comes across an injured, full wolf shift derek who has apparently traveled 300+ miles to him acting only on instinct?? featuring: bed sharing. one of my fav hikes. mutual pining. a restaurant dish called Straight Up Bitch. awkward conversations about past trauma and things you do as a teenager and then regret as an adult. just your usual! original work wise I'm still working on the Captain Swash book, and i've realized it's more like a western but with sailboats.

🤗 What advice would you give to new fanfic writers that are just getting started? ah great question! I would strongly recommend reading a wide variety of things (different genres, poetry, prose, creative nonfiction, etc) to develop your own style. Try to stretch your writing muscles prose wise, structure wise, pacing, plot, etc. Read all the meta about your character/fandom of choice you can. Don't feel obligated to follow popular trends or fanon, try to cultivate your own understanding of the character. And at the end of the day write the fic or thing you want to see most in the world, because other people really want to see it too.

🤲 Would you please share a snippet of a wip?

have this snippet of a previous Captain Swash draft

Had she fought for this land? For so long Swash had felt violently apart from the rest of the world, and yes, she had run, had fled, unfit for human society, unable to remain. She had gone to the coast because she had wanted to see things outside of herself, be outside of herself, there was a whole world out there living and dying and decaying and she could see it all. She had seen improbable things; a moose gliding smoothly beneath the ocean’s tides; black and white whales snapping up salmon; birds mixed with sudden summer rain, like silver fire in the sky. But not everyone loved it; how many times had she gone out in a gale to pilot ships, only to have the sailors curse the raging sky, the wind and the rain? It is almost alive, Swash had wanted to say, thunder booming like a heartbeat, and she had meant I am almost alive; here, in a place desolate, implacably grey and green, eroded, entropic, all of it.

But had she fought for it? For the glaciers’ right to make the world? 

Swash looked out from the balcony, from Vena to the glittering Maggander below, and green Drumlin beyond, and felt tears sting her eyes. When the world broke and dusk grew too long, the sun swallowing itself and all around it, when her bones were a memory, when those memories split like atoms and died along with all light and heat, when the universe became still and dark, she would be gone and not even her mistakes would remain. And you could not fight for that–you did not need to–it was inevitable. Was there a way to take a life and justify it on the bedrock of your reality?

The truth was, she had not fought for anything. Glory was a lie, power was a lie, Riparia was a lie, a lie that consumed, a lie that was never fed, but ate, and ate, and ate. Or maybe she had fought for something intangible and fragmented as fire; childhood was like that; full of things hovering unsaid, and your way of seeing the world was a ghost overlaying reality. And Swash had been such a stupid child; she had questioned nothing–not the despair, not the choked off sentences, not the need for war, not the loss of history, not the woman erasing and effacing and manufacturing that loss–Aviss was like a glacier, making the world–and then came the Front, came the cavalry, came her childish hopes and dreams melting, dissolving, the wood of her shield liquid, the metal of her sword frayed fire in her hand, and the whole world warped, warped, warped, as the sun shone overhead.

[marnz]

for the last 16ish months I was stuck in this fucked up cycle of starting the second draft of my novel, making a mistake or hating it, changing everything and then starting over completely and rewriting everything from the beginning. it sucked SO much and I never got further than chapter 9. got burned out, had to take a break, am now working on a prequel project that I very reluctantly realized was the length and structure of a novel/novella instead of a short story.

in order to break my fucked up cycle of constantly starting over in pursuit of an (impossible) perfect draft I have decided to write the whole thing in long hand. no google docs! no starting over. no intensive editing. so I am writing in long hand for one hour a few days a week and I am finally excited about writing again!

[marnz]

captain swash prequel 🥰

ahhh thanks so much for asking about this!

I really wanted to explore a couple concepts in the Swash prequel. what if the best swordsman in the kingdom was a grizzled butch? what if the experience of war means she's now extremely messy interpersonally and does reckless stuff? what's her mental health like? why does Swash not become heir to the throne? what makes her get out of it--and does she do it subconsciously or was it a conscious decision?

also most importantly: what if swash meets a traumatized little kid and teaches them how to make themself safe? and what does this mean for perpetuating or not perpetuating cycles of trauma and violence? it's fun because in the time's shroud novel/series, which is set almost 20 years later, she's the main character's guardian, she's married, and much more put together, where as in this prequel she's an absolute wreck. it's also fun because she's much more of a Good Guy in the time's shroud series but in this...charcoal gray is the color of House Swash for a reason 🥰

thanks for asking! 💜