It’s not so strange to see monsters in the boarding line.
Now available to all $1+ Patrons: the original version of monsters and The Guy., featured in the original edition of Something's Not Right! With the release of the new edition (and an updated version of the story!) I decided to make the original available to all Patrons as a thank-you. If you subscribe now, you can read not just this but ALL previous $1 posts! Thanks for following along.
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have you listened to hozier's music? bc for some reason a lot of it gives me forest castles vibes... something about earth tones + complicated relationships...
(LAST ANON CONTINUED) specifically i am thinking of jackie and wilson: "happy to lie back, watch it burn and rust // we tried the world, good god, it wasn't for us"
Wow I never answered this ask from October 2019! Well, @goose-books, you now know personally that I agree.
Veritable pride parade of yves. slugs. The first three are my published short stories The Traveler Wife, Bride & Groom, and World Got Smaller, and the final three (including never-before-seen excerpts!!!) are my in-progress novels Sometimes it Happens, Forest Castles, and THE ONE AND ONLY UNIVERSE OF KAY RAINIER.
Some scattered deleted Avner/Eliza moments from this round of edits! If you'd like to read longer excerpts, please head over to Patreon; it funds my writing and allows me to show off the behind-the-scenes of everything!
Do me a favor and don't judge my writing or the characters off of this; I kept thinking I'd find ways to slip these in somewhere better-written, but it's becoming clear there's no place for that. Come dig up my darlings.
Fortunately, Avner comes back just then; he’s wearing one of those white soft flowy shirts that I desperately want more of but don’t know the name for, along with what appear to be leather pants. And no crown, naturally. I wonder if people ever try to steal it.
“Hey,” I say, smoothly and with great finesse. “Nice shirt.”
*
“I like to be able to move around,” I say. “I hate pencil skirts; they’re like little leg-prisons.”
*
I smile back; it’s so easy to forget about the outside world around him. I’m about to think that that must be why someone else liked him, but nope—no more of that. Instead, I say, “You’re funny.” And then I add, “You should say whatever’s on your mind. I promise you I won’t get offended, alright?”
“Those pants make you look like an eggplant,” he says, smooth as can be. Then he looks at me out of the corner of one eye.
“Avoid the vegetable comparisons,” I say, “and we’ll be fine.”
*
“I do,” I say, almost surprised at myself—I guess my fashion tastes are a spectrum. “But I’m worried my arms will get cold.”
“You can wear a jacket,” he offers, standing. “Or one of my capes.”
“I’m not cold right now,” I say quickly, and then internally punch myself. He offered you his clothing and you declined it!! Why don’t you just say you don’t know anything about human mating rituals and leave?! “But—thank you.”
*
Today’s outfit is nice for fighting, actually. Imagine if he was wearing one of those ungodly capes.
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I love @westywrites's proposal to post our old and new writing and celebrate what's changed, and I just began posting the original fencing scene/midpoint from Forest Castles to my Patreon, so here's a comparison about as direct as you'll get: the same bout, between the same characters, with the same undertones, in the same scene, in the same book, four years apart. Congrats to Westy on 5 years & thanks to the people who have stuck around here for 5 years this December!
March 2018:
“Watch closely, Eliza,” Red says, hopping from foot to foot. “This is culture you’re experiencing. Ready?”
Avner nods, and they frown at each other.
“I think I had enough culture in Fencing Club,” I mutter, but it only takes a moment for Red to try to get a jab in. Avner blocks it easily.
“Just checking,” Red chirps. Then he feints left and moves right. Avner knocks his sword out of the way and goes for his chest, but Red blocks that. After that, things become a bit of a blur—most fencing is pretty fast to begin with, but Avner and Red have irritably matched styles, where Red is just aiming for a hit pretty much everywhere and Avner has a guard range the size of a small horse.
April 2022:
“En garde,” I say, with the French accent, because it’s a French phrase—someone snickers again—and then, “ready, fence.”
Red immediately goes in for the hit, and Avner immediately parries. I notice Avner lets Red take right of way, too; instead of leaping forward for an attack, he moves comfortably back on the tinsel piste, sometimes twitching his blade to bait Red, sometimes just watching him. It’s unnerving, on my end, as someone who Avner clearly didn’t consider a threat. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be on the opposite end of that gaze. Red feints towards Avner’s head and then tries to swat his hip, but Avner is fast enough to parry both. They face each other, each panting lightly. Red stalks, stalks, stalks down the piste towards Avner, clearly hoping to run him out of room, and Avner plays along, until a foot from the end—he stops short, baiting Red into a long lunge, and then dodges just out of the way. He sweeps a hit under Red’s arm before Red can recover. The exact move I tried to play on him, successful this time.
I call halt and stick my right arm out with the fingers down, hoping this doesn’t make me look like a colossal Forest-douche. “Attack from the right arrives.” Nobody laughs at this, so apparently I’ve done it correctly. Which I have, because I know how to referee, when people aren’t making fun of me for speaking French. Red and Avner return to their starting positions, and I manage the English call again.
"Alright. Well. I get this feeling like you think you’re normal—like you’re some boring rando and I hung out with you because of coincidence. Which is kind of true. But you’re funny, and you’re cool, and you’re—I don’t know, I like hanging out with you, I picked you because I liked you, and I was right. And now Avner likes you, too, and I bet everybody else here would also like you. Because you are special. You matter. You are very important. And if you want to leave, okay, you can leave, but I want you to understand why people stay first. And if you end up staying, I don’t want it to feel like you lost the game. I don’t want you to feel like I was right and you were wrong. Because it won’t be like that. Not at all.” He loosens his grip. “And you’re very cute,” he adds, potentially as an afterthought.
It's still happening, just rephrased. I wouldn't be surprised if I rephrased it again later. But I wanted to condense this moment, and I'm also still not 100% set on what I want Red to convey here. Maybe he doesn't need to say anything at all. Further musings below the cut!
It struck me as I was editing this today that KAY RAINIER will hopefully have a strikingly similar line later on-- I want someone to say, in Book Two, "Everybody loves you, Kay." It's something that is obvious when posed as a question or even a statement (the entire series could be the thesis statement for Everybody Loves Kay) but does not occur to Kay herself.
It's also interesting because Atlas would not care. Atlas knows a lot of people do not like him and he does not give a fuck. It is important to him that Kay specifically likes him, and this forms much of the Book One conflict, but that is eventually proven. In Book Two he never doubts. His concerns are with being good for the sake of being good, for his own confidence and for the care he wants to give to others.
Kay, on the other hand, wants to get a good grade in being lovable. She wants to deserve to be loved; when she loves someone she feels the need to meet their every need to deserve the way they make her feel. It does not occur to her at any point that love is not really earned in this way, and not only that she has it but that it is not dependent on her being the way she is. I think Kay has this concern that if she stopped being This Way, everything would fall apart, and everyone's lives would be ruined, and she would be an utterly worthless person, and if she is not useful to others then why would they love her? She is so focused on the prescriptive, the measurable level of loveableness that she does not notice, descriptively, that she is already extensively loved. She is so insane; I love to write it.
Contrastively, again, I don't think Eliza actually needs to hear this. I think I have Red saying "you are loved" when what Eliza needs to hear is "you belong." And, I suppose, "you matter." "You are loved" is supposed to be a vehicle for that, and I don't think it quite is yet. I'll have to keep rewriting this dialogue until I'm happy with it.
I also find it quite interesting that this is a theme that comes up in my writing often enough to merit note. I suppose it is something I'm personally concerned with, and I write from largely self-indulgent perspectives in this manner... which then got me thinking about what we as a society value in writing and what makes good writing and whether there's genuinely anything wrong with writing something just to make some teenage girl somewhere feel like she is special. I think my #1 goal with Forest Castles is for some jaded teenage girl to feel special and worthy of magic and rest and hot boys, because they all so very much are. I have been thinking a lot about "wish fulfillment" and "self-indulgence" and so on because of my apparent thesis paper on The Mocked Genres (YA, Romance, fanfiction, etc.).
Now, I could have easily said all this aloud to myself or to the wall across from me, but I wrote it out because I do like to write and share these thoughts. If you enjoyed reading these thoughts, I highly recommend subscribing to my Patreon, because that is where this sort of thing lives when I'm not transcribing it for NaNoWriMo! In both the $1 and $5 tiers, actually, depending on if you want behind-the-scenes for what's been posted or never-before-seen writing. See you there!
A really long time ago, someone under the username @lxstforlxfe on Tumblr drew me two beautiful high fashion Elizas. I hope they don't mind my posting them now-- I wish I could reach out to them, but the blog is empty and untaggable! Thank you, anyhow, for the art. I've appreciated it all these years.
