I swear I haven’t forgotten UC guys.. the plan is for it to come out this year. The goal is summer but I’m not too sure about that.. anyway have a sneak peak!
In celebration of finishing the query draft for TSOTE (and submitting two queries, ah!) here is a bit from The Sound of the End:
Wet sand squished under the new boots I had gotten in town, fountaining up through surrounding clam tunnels. The drag marks from my kayak reached halfway up the beach, so there was no chance of it getting taken by the tide. I set off between the small dunes, sand fleas and seagulls hopping out of my way. The wind had picked up, whisking grains of sand across the spit. I hiked in a ways then started down the spit. Eventually I ended up at the top of one of the larger dunes, seated and looking out toward the ocean. Morro Rock loomed over the beach in the distance.
I was glad the creatures in town seemed to have little interest in exploring the spit. If they did I would be stuck on my boat almost twenty-four seven, and I would be going insane.
If you had to guess what genre this book was, what would you say?
When you see an attractive stranger while partying, you decide that it has been too long since you’ve had an adventure. The exact terms of your loose liaison are soon put to the test.
-
Word Count: 2693
Without you asking him to, Katsuki had made room in his life for you. You were not sure whether he had done so intentionally or whether he had even noticed himself doing so – but it was undebatable that you were now a constant in the formula of his everyday life.
From your toiletries in the bathroom to the ever-respawning bottle of your favorite soda in the refrigerator, you had, for all intents and purposes, become the fourth teammate in the guys’ three-men living arrangement.
Today was not the first time you had taken part in mundane activities such as buying groceries, but for the first time, it was only Eijirou and you who were doing so together. And, going against all odds and all of your worries, it was not awkward at all.
“So, we got coffee, milk, bread and bottled water. We still need detergent and hand soap,” you recited, reading off the shopping list you had prepared on your phone.
“Hand soap? We never have hand soap,” Eijirou answered with surprising certainty, turning the shopping cart and heading down the aisle towards household necessities, you following closely behind him.
“Yeah, and I worry about what that says about your relationship with hygiene.” Their apartment was fairly clean, especially in the light of their being three male (barely-still-)teenagers, but you (rightly) attributed that to Katsuki’s neatness more than anything.
“Alright, alright, we are getting hand soap, new queen of the apartment.” His laugh was contagious.
“You don’t actually mind my being around so much, do you?” You were laughing along with him. Still, for a moment there, you were scared he was going to give you an answer you would not like.
“Not at all! You’re friendly, you clean up more of a mess than you make, and Bakugou’s less grumpy when you’re there. If anyone moves out, I vote it’s him.”
You scoffed. “You don’t actually mean that.”
He grinned his brightest of grins. “I really don’t. He’s kind of my best friend.”
Taking two pink bottles of detergent from the shelves and putting them inside the cart, you added onto your statement. “Besides, once he’s gone, I’m gone.”
“Right,” he said without missing a beat. “I forgot you’re a package deal. It’s still kinda hard to believe Bakugou has a girlfriend.”
The reply you had become used to giving to insinuations such as this one came without the need for you to exceed much thought. “I’m not his girlfriend.”
The noise Eijirou gave instead of saying anything in response said more than enough: Sure, if that’s what you want to believe.
“…and this concludes the perspective I wanted to share with you on the topic of secondary characteristics of less common quirks. Thank you for your attention. If you have any remaining questions, now’s the time to ask.”
While it may have sounded rather professional, that was only the case because you had repeated those sentences to yourself again and again last night until you had known them by heart. It was your first time speaking in front of an audience in years. Before you had been forced to press pause on your university career, you had somehow managed to avoid all seminars that required presentations as part of their grading system. Now, you had intentionally fit several of them into your semester schedule as a challenge to yourself. The first one was done with.
You could feel your heart beating in your tongue and you had stumbled over your words a few times. Your hands were clammy and shaking. But, and this was the most important notion to take away from today – you had survived.
The auditorium was too large for the two dozen people sitting in it. Their lack of further questions was almost certainly not due to your presentational skills but rather due to the general loss of enthusiasm students tended to experience at some point between their first and sixth semester.
After receiving some mostly favorable feedback from your professor, you left the building and headed off campus. You could not wait to tell your not-boyfriend about what you had achieved today.
Speaking of secondary characteristics of uncommon quirks – you had realized early on that Katsuki’s skin was flawless. For a while, you had chalked it up to simple great luck or a kind puberty. It was only after you had participated in several sessions of your aforementioned seminar about uncommon quirks that you had begun to entertain the possibility that those two phenomena might be related.
“So, not only do you get an awesome quirk, but it actually clears up your skin at the same time? That’s so unfair!” you complained from where you were sitting next to him on his bed.
“That’s just how glycerin works, woman.” His smirk let you know that although it was pure luck that he had been able to draw from such a good gene pool, he was at least a little proud of it.
“Still, it’s so not fair. Ten years from now, I’ll probably look twenty years older than I do now, and you’ll still be a walking skincare ad.”
“If that bothers you already, you’ll fucking love my mom. She’s almost fifty and looks like she never fucking turned thirty.”
You could have sworn that your heart stopped for about three and a half seconds right there. It was clear to you he had meant nothing by it. So, you decided to smooth it over by saying something by which you meant nothing at all, either.
“What reason would I have to meet my not-boyfriend’s mother? To congratulate her on her clear skin?”
“You could congratulate her on creating me, a.k.a. the greatest fucking thing that’s ever happened to you.” Considering how arrogant he could be and how dry he kept his voice when saying things like these, it could be difficult to mistake his specific brand of humor for serious statements. You, however, knew better.
Still, for a moment, you were inclined to grab a pillow from his bed and hit him over the head with it. Instead, you let yourself fall backwards so you were lying on the mattress. “Well, I guess you do have a handful of good qualities if I’m squinting. Five, maybe, if I were to count.”
He raised an eyebrow at you. You responded – very maturely – by sticking out your tongue at him. He accepted the unspoken challenge. Less than a moment later, he had you pinned underneath his body, straddling your thighs and holding your wrists above your head with both hands.
“Is fucking you until you can’t walk straight on the list?”
You arched your back, trying to push your breasts against his chest and whining when his grasp on you proved too tight for you to do so. “It’s at the very top,” you promised into his mouth, and then he was kissing you.
You had not had any alcohol since that fateful night at the club.
Letting down your guard around strangers made you feel threatened, so Katsuki and you had gone clubbing less and less, as well. Perhaps it was for the best – you were an adult after all, so maybe you could afford to have a lifestyle befitting one.
You also could not bring yourself to wear the clothes from that night again. So you packed them into a carton, along with some books that reminded you of the people that had gifted them to you and that were no longer part of your life. Then, you donated that box to the charity shop down the road from your home.
It was a shame that Katsuki’s room provided no other seating option for two besides his bed. Or maybe it actually was not that much of a shame, since it was your preferred place to be anyways. He had spent good money on the mattress, and your back agreed with you on the decision to spend as little time as possible at your own apartment. Said apartment was becoming more of a storage space than anything at this point.
What did the two of you even do together with all of those joint hours?
All kinds of things, really. A lot of it was sex, or lead-up to sex, or post-coital coexistence. Any time left over after subtracting those pastimes was just the both of you doing your own thing while coincidentally in the same room. You enjoyed it. You liked occupying the same space as him. You appreciated breathing the same air as him.
In all truth, you could probably spend the rest of your life lying next to him like this and simply looking at him.
He had not got dressed yet, but it was not like he had ever minded being nude. Reading the news on his phone, he was not looking in your direction, allowing you to watch him. You were plenty sure he still knew that you were watching him, however. He was more attentive than he would ever admit out loud, and somehow, he tended to simply know things.
Sometimes, you wondered what he saw in you. It was clear to you why you stuck with him. He was gorgeous, from his spiky blond hair to those red eyes you wanted to drown in, from the scar below his collarbone to his long, muscular legs. But beyond his picturesque body, beyond even the sex that was genuinely the best you had ever had, there was the fact that things were easy with him.
When you had told him about your disorder, you had expected it to be the end of your story. But it had not been. Instead, without wasting a lot of pretty words, he had simply accepted it as fact and moved on. It was what he did for everything you did and shared with him. When you had mentioned that you were going back to university, his response had been, “About time.”
(If he were anyone but himself, it would not have come across even nearly as supportive.)
When you had told him about how well your presentation had gone, he had asked, “What else had you expected?”
(And if he were anyone but himself, it would not have sounded nearly as proud.)
But he must have seen something in you, else he would not have kept you around for this long. You did not know what it was, but you were grateful for it nonetheless.
At this point, it was becoming hard to imagine a life without him.
It had always been hard for you to tell the difference between obsession and love. It was even more so now that Katsuki had made himself at home in the greater scheme of your life. But maybe you had been wrong to assume that you could only ever either be obsessed or in love. Maybe you had been so scared of anything that could at all be interpreted as something akin to a symptom of mania that you had never let yourself consider that one did not work without at least a tiny bit of the other.
After all, what was love if not a mild form of insanity?
The fancy-looking cream envelope had been sitting on Katsuki’s desk for weeks now. You had first noticed it when you had sat down there to work on your presentation. It had been in the way, and you had put it to the side without giving it much thought.
The next day, it had been right back in its former place, as if it had never been moved. Still, you gave it little to no thought.
A few days later, you were packing your bag, getting ready to go back to your own place for the first time in a week. (The mail did not check itself.) You set it on the desk chair while you were folding your worn clothes. (Perhaps, a load of laundry would also prove commendable.)
In doing so, you accidentally knocked over the folded card that was sitting upright on the desk, the surrounding envelope now gone. You set it back up, automatically reading the beginning of the first sentence. ‘You are cordially invited to…’
Then you stopped, a little annoyed that you had read anything at all. It was not your invitation, and thus none of your business. You made sure it looked untouched, finished packing and left.
A little while later, you found yourself in a hurry to arrive at university on time. The mornings were becoming colder, and, as these things with indirect proportionality tend to work, Katsuki’s bed was becoming harder to leave with each passing day. While you ran into the stairway with your hair yet unbrushed, your note pad lay on the desk, forgotten about.
It was a long day, which made your lack of note paper all the more jarring. When you came back to Katsuki’s that evening, your note pad was waiting for you. With the fancy invitation somehow having found its way on top of it. It became clear that these were not coincidences at all.
‘You are cordially invited to the 27th annual Heroes’ Gala to celebrate the strides our society has made since the advent of quirks and heroism. We will be accepting donations, all of which are to go into the Official Hero Registry’s fund to compensate and support civilians who have been hurt or who have experienced damage at the hands of villains. Please let us know whether you will be in attendance, and whether you will have someone joining you.’
Beneath the text, there was further information on the date, place and exact time.
You had not even taken your coat off yet, and you did not. Instead, you turned on your heel, walking towards the kitchen with the omnipresent invitation still in your hand.
Inside the kitchen, there was Katsuki in front of the stove, finishing dinner. (He liked to cook. You enjoyed your position as a beneficiary.) He did not even jump a little when you poked his lower back with the card – it seemed he had become so used to your presence that hardly anything surprised him anymore.
Without further greeting, you launched straight into the topic at hand. “So, where am I gonna find this next? Inside the closet, conveniently stored between my underwear?” You were trying hard not to sound as amused as you were. He was so bad at these things, and you loved him for it. It was getting harder not to think that word, love.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” was his reply, was his lie, because he could see the piece of paper in your hand and because he obviously knew what you were talking about.
“I’m talking about this charity gala thing. What is it?”
“It’s stupid, is what it is.” He was refusing to look at you, instead stirring the vegetables inside the pan with a lot more gusto than necessary. “It’s this shitty important hero bullshit. It’s dumb as hell.”
“And also, you really want to go there,” you added, voicing out loud what he was incapable of saying.
A lack of reply was also a reply.
After a moment of silence, you continued. “You know, I’m just gonna put this out there. If you want me to go with you, you might just have to actually ask me.”
As the seconds passed, the distance between you did not change, but your perception of it did. Eventually, you were unable to take both the silence and the distance, so you had to get rid of at least one of them. You stepped behind him, wrapping your arms around his slim waist and resting your cheek between his shoulder blades. He smelled like frying oil and sweat and all-around perfect. The heat from the stove reminded you that you were still wearing your coat. It did not matter.
What mattered was that after a much-too-long silence for a simple question such as this one, he asked, “Would you?”
You had had your fair share of hesitation for one night. For one lifetime. “I would.”
A walkway had already been secured between the Pisces and the ferry, leading to the side where the cars would have once boarded. A few people were gathered there, bundled in coats and hats, waiting for us to cross. Philip looked with trepidation at the walkway, then at Isabel, who had their baby in a sling across her chest, tucked under her coat.
“I’ve got it,” she said. “Just give me a hand.”
They took it slow, even though it wasn’t a long walk, and when they reached the other side one of the waiting people helped Isabel down. An exclamation of surprise greeted them when they noticed the baby on Isabel’s chest.
I'm dragging myself through this editing pass, y'all. I'm a little over half way through, aiming to be done by the end of June. But DAMN, it's a challenge to wrangle my brain into working on this.
7 lines, from TSOTE Book 1, which I'm currently editing (thoroughly...)
Out of the newspaper rolled a gun. It was a revolver, along with a decently heavy pouch of bullets. “You know I don’t know how to use this, right?”
“Point and shoot,” he said. “Terrance can give you lessons, but try not to waste ammo, that’s all you’ve got for now, and it’s not like we can get more easily. Not yet at least. That’s about forty shots you’ve got there.
Hi there its the team at @ask-a-thon . Happy Thursday Ask-A-Thon, what's been your proudest moment in a wip and proudest moment of a character?
Interesting—I hadn’t really thought about this much until now….
I don’t think there’s just one moment that I’m proud of. I think for a WIP one thing was when, in my TSOTE series, I realized who the actual antagonists were. And by that I realized that there wasn’t just one “villain” and the conflict was more that just black and white good versus evil, and it (along with the protagonists and antagonists) were way more complex and nuanced that that. And I stopped trying to fit my Antagonists into the Bad Guy box, and my protagonists into the Good Guy box, and just let them do what was right for them and their story.
For a character (Also from TSOTE), I’m always proud of when Darcy lets herself be more vulnerable and is able to ask for or accept help from her friends/community. She’s really bad at it (and so am I), so it’s an accomplishment.
hey! this is chance & here’s this week’s prompt. pick one of your ocs. how would they react if they suddenly appeared right next to you, in the modern world? what would happen?
Oof.
Okay—so if they KNEW WHO I WAS and that I’m responsible for their woes…. Nothing good. Darcy would probably actually try and kill me. She’s from a world that severely messed up and she’s not very happy there right now.
If she didn’t know that I’ve got my fingers all over her reality, we’d probably get on just fine, and she’d probably be pretty chill with the break from fighting monsters and fascists. Then she’d probably want to go back because she’d be really worried about everyone that was left behind in her reality.
Maeve, even if she knew that I’m kind a god to her reality, would probably just roll with it? Because she comes from a universe where there are already gods meddling in people’s lives. She probably wouldn’t be thrilled, but wouldn’t attempt bodily harm immediately. I think she’d be a little shook about being in a world without magic, but eventually would be chill with that too, cause she has a… rocky relationship with her own magic and wouldn’t be upset if it just disappeared. Would ALSO be distressed about everyone she left behind, though.
Darcy would adjust to this reality better, since the only difference between this one and hers is that hers has been overrun by inter dimensional monsters and society collapsed.
Maeve would probably have a tougher time adjusting, since she’s used to things like space travel and teleportation and telepathy. Not to mention magical healing and whatnot.
