Song of the Heartless - Coming to you May 4, 2024!
That's the date I'm gonna start serializing it on @project-heartless-serial!! Follow and turn on notifications if you'd like?
If you like:
*A primarily aromantic cast being unapologetically aro (aspec identities galore!)
*a generous sprinkle of body horror and action
*focus on a queerplatonic relationship between the MC and their partner
*an egg getting cracked and the exploration thereof (if you know you know)
*found family
*fighting monsters
*fighting against an oppressive system
*a rainy atmospheric setting
Then you will enjoy this book!
Further details and a sneak peek of the prologue under the cutoff:
Working Title: Project Heartless
Genre: Queer, Dystopian Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Horror
Length: 118K
Tag: #projectheartless
The Heartless are empty of morals– just as nonexistent as their heart.
That was what Rainier Sandoval had been taught at an early age. As an Inner City dweller, the barbarism in the Outer District, where the Heartless thrived, was hard to imagine. But when his own heart was stolen and crushed on his twenty-fifth birthday, he was exiled to that very place, forced to see for himself.
He had thought he was prepared, but the expectations were so horribly different from the reality. Conspiracies were afoot, and the more he stayed in Outer District, the more he realized he had been lied to his entire life.
The monsters he was taught to fear might be Angel City's only hope against threats lurking beyond its borders. In a twist of fate, they might also be Rainier's only hope against his own inner demons.
It couldn't think. It felt. It writhed. There was so much pain. Pushing it together.
Its mind was screaming. Its mind was filled with voices. So many people crammed in such a small space. Like a box filled to the brim with half-dead corpses. Anger bubbled inside, never-ending.
It didn't know why. All It knew was the Anger. All It knew was the Pain. From the distance, It could hear a mournful cry. Like a child begging to die. It made the Anger rise, overwhelming. The collective indignance of a thousand souls. It Hurt. It Hurt. It Hurt.
So it ripped. Blood poured out in rivulets. It wanted more. It craved. It hungered.
It felt flesh tear in its hands, but It could not see. It felt blood flow down its arms, but It didn't have any. It heard screams echo inside its head, but there was also someone outside, gasping. Begging. Gurgling.
Screams from the inside. Screams from the outside.
"Rowan!"
"Stay in formation, Will!"
"No— ROWAN!"
"It's coming! Duck!"
"It's too late for him, stay back!"
It heard it. It heard them. Anger surged, so It raged. It fought. But It also wanted to see. It knew It was but a mere voice in the sea of consciousness, but It wanted to see. It wanted to know. The fear that those voices let out, the tremble in their pained gasps. It wanted to know.
Am I the one hurting them?
But the Anger, oh, the Anger — it was all-consuming. It was so filled with Hurt. They were hurting It. In the distance, the Child was weeping. Begging for the torture to end. The Anger won't stop until the Child was set free. But it had been so long. It's been so long, and It wondered what was the point, what was It doing, was throwing back all of this hurt and pain and agony worth it—
It wanted to rest. Because it hurt. Being pressed together like this, it hurt.
We must, we should, we are stronger together, we must destroy, we must avenge, we must save, THEY HAVE NOT LEARNED THEIR LESSON—
"Rowan! No!"
So It kept tearing. It kept killing.
It will not stop.
"No!" A sob. It niggled something inside it. Even as its brethren whispered, even as they jeered and cheered and wanted and laughed and reveled in their cruelty — It heard, and it didn't feel right because the cries, the sobs, the tears—
Isn't that also just a child?
So It climbed, It groped the others. It tore through their consciousness as it tried to get a grip. It wanted to see. It wanted to know. It wanted to See.
It doesn't matter, the others whispered. We are killing. We are avenging.
No.
It pushed everything away. It felt the body moving, it felt the body going for the kill. It felt the body fighting against someone. It couldn't control it, but It persisted. Because It didn't feel right. Because It wanted to See.
It gasped as It got control of the eyes. It opened them for the first time in centuries.
And It saw... a young man, no more than sixteen, looking at It as if It was death personified.
Because It was.
KILL KILL KILL KILL
NO.
Its hands were wrapped around the boy's throat. And It couldn't help but think about life leeching out of the boy's brilliant green eyes.
The boy, the young man, was a human.
It blinked. Memories in the back of Its head surged through its shattered fragments like a fog.
After a bit of thought, I dedicated Project Heartless to the aros who love to kiss.
Rain, despite losing his heart and thus losing his capacity for romantic love, is still a bisexual person. He still gets attracted to people. He still wants to kiss them, still wants to have sex. Becoming aro didn't stop that. He's an allosexual aro. And I think we rarely see that in stories. Even more reason for me to write it.
A beta reader once called Rain 'gross' because of his attractions. I don't know what to make of that. I respectfully disagree.
This is not to say that you need to be allosexual to love kissing! I don't think its an inherently romantic or sexual thing.
Funny story: I didn't consider myself a horror writer. Never mind that I write about hearts being surgically snipped out of ribcages and tar monsters tearing heads off and a enormous creatures with ears growing between fingers. I was so relunctant to call Project Heartless a horror novel. I didn't think it was horrific enough to qualify.
Until I actually read horror books. The thing is: I love writing horror, but I didn't like reading or watching it. I am too much of a scaredy-cat. But one day I just went: you know what? This is stupid. And picked up a horror book because I gotta know what is out there. I gotta understand the genre that my novel maybe is in. And I fell in love with it. Particularly queer horror. It was powerful. And I'm... pretty sure my novel now qualifies as horror. Apparently you don't need ghosts and serial killers for that.
I don't have a point for this post. I suppose I just want to say... read into the genre you're writing? Even if it takes away from your limited writing time. It may give you the confidence you never knew.
First 9 chapters of Project Heartless are scheduled and queued at @project-heartless-serial ! Follow that sideblog and turn on your notifs if you want! Aaahhhhh this is happening. May 4, 2024 is the release of the first chapter! I will be releasing a chapter (roughly 3k words) a week. I'm excited and scared at the same timeee
Thanks for the tag @late-to-the-fandom and @mk-writes-stuff! I will share a snippet from Project Heartless:
---
No!
Still loopy from his concussion, Rainier fought through the pain and grabbed the assailant's arm, uncaring of the sticky blood that stained his fingers, growling like a wild animal as he tried to take his heart back. The assailant did not seem to expect Rainier to fight back at all, and was caught off guard as Rainier used all his strength to turn them both around to pin him down on the floor. The assailant yelped, and Rainier shook his head to get rid of the dizzying feeling. He snarled. "Give it back!"
"Argh!" The assailant grunted as he struggled. They wrestled for a while, but Rainier was trained by some of the best and he managed to pin him down even with his weight advantage. Even so, this couldn't continue. He needed to find a way to incapacitate him or they would be here forever. Wait no— he just needed back-up. He needed to alert the security.
The rooms in this house always had a distress button. He thought there might actually be one in this very bathroom. He looked up, trying to see through the darkness. It must be by the door, by the light switch—
There!
Rainier grabbed his heart from the man's hands in a quick motion and then dove for the distress button. Unfortunately, the assailant wasn’t going to make it easy on him. It only took a split second. There was a flash of metal, the assailant pulling a knife out of his thigh sheath, and then the arm reaching for the button fell off from his elbow, his blood spraying on the floor. For a moment, Rainier didn’t process it.
But then the pain came.
Rainier screamed.
It was a scream of anguish. If he thought having his chest torn open was bad, it was nothing compared to losing an arm. The fact that he didn’t have a heart to pump his blood was the only reason it wasn’t pouring out in buckets, and Rainier wondered if he was dreaming. He had to be, wasn’t he? These kinds of things just do not happen to him. But it was so painful, and it hurt so bad, that it couldn’t possibly be a dream.
Rainier couldn’t focus on anything. His knowledge on self defense meant nothing when he was writhing in agony. The assailant kicked him off and he hit the floor with a wet sound. His heart was once again ripped out of his possession, and soon the assailant was leaving the bathroom to escape.
With his heart.
--
Tagging @french-toast-enjoyer and @interroblog to share some of their writing as well :D
This is an excerpt from Project Heartless! I was rereading and just thought I'd share :D
"They," Briar said from behind him. Rainier yelped. He didn't realize that Briar was already behind him. "My pronouns are they/them. How hurt are you?"
Rainier didn't reply to the question because he was too busy making sense of the first statement. "Pronouns what?"
Briar stared at him with her– their – piercing gray eyes. And then he – they – smiled, something mischievous that Rainier had not seen from her – them, dammit! – all their weeks together. The whole time he had known them it seemed as though they were kind of a serious person, but now they were smiling like they were enjoying a joke... at Rainier's expense.
"Right, you were from the Inner City," they said. "Couple of stuck-ups they were. In the Outer District, pronouns are respected. I'd expect you to respect mine too, hm?"
"You're not..." Rainier's mind was swirling in pain and confusion. He wanted to say 'you're not multiple people' but then remembered that they is also singular, a way to refer to someone in a gender-neutral… but why would someone even want to use it? He didn't understand. "Why would you use 'they'?"
"Seems fitting, isn't it?" Briar said. "Since I'm neither a man nor a woman."
Rainier short-circuited.
Someone tried to grab Briar's attention, and they turned to address them. Briar said something to him before they walked away, but Rainier didn't hear it. All he could think about was the words 'neither man nor a woman', the phrase swirling around in his pain-addled head. Something about it made his spine prickle but also made something inside him soar, in a way that was scary, horrible, and wonderful at the same time.
Being neither a man nor a woman...
...you could do that?
