ZINE PROJECT: PUBLISHED 3,831 words Saint of Kindred Spirits: 9,985/75,000 words project silence: 1,970/30,000 words Where the Light Dances: just vibing! Personal: @bisexual-kelsier (I follow from there)
Hi there! I didn’t even know these intros were a thing until yesterday, but I’m always looking for new writing friends, so better late than never!
Name: Orion Arthur
Pronouns: he/him
Age: 26
Authors who inspire me: Brandon Sanderson, Leigh Bardugo, Suzanne Collins, V.E. Schwab, Becky Chambers, Philip Pullman, Ursula K. Le Guin
Other inspirations: mythology and folklore, theology, history, music (this space left intentionally vague or we would be here all day), The Adventure Zone: Balance, Camlann (podcast), Welcome to Night Vale, Over the Garden Wall, Firefly, Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom
Other hobbies: TTRPGs, visual art, crochet
Genres: fantasy with horror elements, sometimes fanfiction
I like to write: messy queer characters, dramatic irony, the power of love and friendship, hope in the face of impossible odds, art as magic and magic as art, divinity in the ordinary
Bonus features: queer, trans, neurodivergent, unhealthy relationship with serif fonts, crippling addiction to commas, almost failed classes in high school because I did NaNoWriMo instead of homework
Main/personal blog: @bisexual-kelsier
Project blog: @wherethelightdances
My WIP
Saint of Kindred Spirits
The spirits will have their vengeance.
adult fantasy
3rd person
multiple points of view
primarily queer main cast
working on draft 1
Ellis Daling is many things--a powerless prince, a drunken rake, a charming musician. He spends his days suffocating in a palace where he has no place and his nights sneaking off to seedy taverns where he can forget who he is for a while.
But his life is turned upside down when a chance encounter with Carian, an infuriating rebel leader with mysterious origins, awakens magic he never knew he had--an ability sure to get him executed if the wrong person finds out about it.
Ellis is forced to turn to Carian for help learning to control his newfound powers and finds himself quickly pushed to the forefront of the rebel cause, caught precariously between his family, his beliefs, and his budding feelings for Carian. It's only a matter of time before he'll be forced to choose his priorities, and the fate of his nation may hinge on his decision.
Content warnings: alcohol abuse, bigotry, violence and mild gore, familial tension, non-explicit sexual content — this list is not exhaustive, I am a discovery writer first and a person second
If you’re interested in beta reading this project, swapping writing, etc., please shoot me a message! I’d love to get to know you! For personal comfort reasons, I will not be sending my work on this project to anyone under 18.
Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):
“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.
“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.
“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.
“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”
“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”
“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.
its unfortunate that artists get talked out of their rare perspectives so often. ‘its just not done that way’ someone says and artist goes ‘oh okay guess ill sand that part off.’ bud that is your SPARK. so much of my success is from holding firm on the things i do that were called ridiculous
this timeline CRAVES your rare perspective. it CRAVES the thing that speaks from your heart but ‘isn’t the way things are done.’ when i talk about ‘what is your story OUTSIDE of the text?’ i am speaking of this. your personal tap into the cosmic is your rare perspective
I will add that many times my publisher (publisher unspecific, I’ve had several) has tried to market my books as cookie cutter and it is always a hideous failure! As is whenever I try to write stories that conform to trends or received wisdom.
The stories I’ve written that have done best were absolutely out of left field from a marketing perspective.
One of the greatest problems I have is when readers go ‘I expected your book to be just like that other book!’ And I must always say, very gently, ‘Beloved, *I* never told you that.’ (And I was probably down on my knees begging for my publisher not to tell you that either.)
Be the writer that you are, not the writer that you aren’t.
If you haven't heard, the em dash has been getting a lot of attention lately…
Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.
Including (sigh) the em dash.
There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.
A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.
No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.
You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.
Defend the em dash.
(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
My fic for Set in Stone: An Underland Chronicles Zine is now up on AO3! If you read it in the zine and liked it, or if you missed it entirely, please consider giving it some love here! It was so amazing to be a part of this project and I’m so happy with how this work turned out. I hope everyone else enjoys it, too!
The day has finally come! We're pleased to present to you our completed zine, 1 year after its announcement! Inside, you'll find over 81,000 words and over 350 pages of content created by 20 contributors, based on The Underland Chronicles by Suzanne Collins, as well as 7 free digital merch items.
Find the PDFs here!
We have both single page and spread PDFs available, so you can choose to print it out at home if you'd like!
We'd like to sincerely thank our contributors for all of the effort they put in to making an AMAZING zine. If you haven't already, please take a moment to check out the individual accounts of our contributors and consider supporting them! Each and every one of them has put a tremendous amount of work into creating this zine for free!
And, finally, we'd like to thank you, questers! What would such a feat be without YOU to share it with?
This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.
e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.
I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.
This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.
And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.
The lush grass muffled Altair's heavy footsteps. Plant life was not especially common in the city, but the palace courtyard felt less like the rooftop garden his parents had frequently hosted parties in and more like the sprawling woods surrounding his family’s summer home in the country. If he didn't know better, he might assume he was in an endless forest, rather than a space the size his childhood bedroom.
The trees that rose from the ground here were older than the palace itself. This was the only piece of forested land for miles around that had been left undisturbed by the exponential growth of the city over centuries past. The walls on all sides were mirrored and the glass ceiling high above allowed gentle sunlight to filter in. What could not be achieved by infrastructure was carefully cultivated by a combination of magic and the work of several gardeners, meticulously maintaining the illusion of untouched nature.
Altair was pleased to find that none of the singers or the gardeners were present now. It was rare to find a moment alone in the bustling palace, even in his own apartment, but he desperately needed a moment of solitude now. Each of his movements echoed off of the mirrored walls, the soft clink of his ceremonial armor magnified by the silence of the trees. Slowly, he made his way to the center of the courtyard, his feet carrying him to the Watcher.
No one knew the story of the knight whose armor had guarded the palace since it was built, but Altair had always felt a strong kinship to him. The rust and moss threatening to overtake the metal once polished, the grass and wildflowers that grew up through gaps in the joints—eternal, yet reclaimed by the earth. He often thought that this would be him some day. Dead and gone, still loyally defending his King. This was his purpose, this would be right.
Altair fell to his knees before the Watcher. His future, his antithesis. Here he knelt, shining in the filtered sunlight, tension held in every muscle of his body. There, the knight laid peacefully, dull in the shade. How must it feel, to be at rest?
A single drop of blood slid from his brow onto the soft soil before him. Altair took a deep, steadying breath.
“Lend me your strength,” he whispered. “I know you had it once. They built the walls of this palace around you, they did so for a reason. Help me to be what he needs, even when I am weak.”
His words were met by the tranquil silence of the forest. A light breeze picked up, carrying upon it a strong, earthy scent that he couldn’t quite place, laced with the familiar sharpness of magic. His head snapped up and he looked about the courtyard, expecting to see one of its attendants.
He saw no one.
The scent and the breeze grew stronger, the branches of the trees stirring in a manner Altair had never seen before. The sound of rusty metal scraping against itself filled the air, and he fell forward onto his palms, looking on incredulously as the Watcher sat up.
He stared, dumbfounded, as it considered him.
“What—“ Altair managed to start, before he was cut off by a hoarse whisper, carried on the wind that now circled around them.
“Hear my oath before the trees who witnessed my fall, who still whisper tales of my deeds to the wind. You will go now and reveal to the world your truth. Who are you, Knight, without your King? Show us, show the trees and the wind and the soil. Show us and, in a year’s time, meet me. Meet me where the light dances, and what you give will in turn be given.”
And then, just as quickly as it had begun, the armor fell back as if it had never moved, the scent dissipated, and the air stilled.
Altair sat rigid, his eyes fixed on the Watcher. No one would believe this. No one would believe him.
But maybe, for once in his life, it didn't matter what anyone else thought.
He clambered to his feet in a burst of manic vitality. Who are you, Knight, without your King? He didn't know. He didn't know. But for once, for once, he would set aside his guilt long enough to let the catalyst take hold.
it's very important to read good books so you can know when your prose is bad but it's also very important to read the rest of the books so you can know when your prose is ok. fine. send it.
Fiiiiinally drew Ellis properly (though I did forget a couple details, like his scar. And his wedding ring.) and figured I should share him here. Also wrote a lil scene that takes place some time (a couple years?) before SoKS last week… It’s rough right now but I might edit it and share it in the near future. Exciting stuff.
Having to write a difficult chapter is just me repeatedly going "urghrgh... they should invent a fic that writes itse-- *remembers AI* they should not invent a fic that writes itself"
NOTICE: As more and more fanfic writers are using generative AI for their works (you uncreative dweebs), I hereby swear on everything I hold dear that I have not and will NEVER use generative AI in ANY of my written work. Everything I post will be organically and creatively my own.
Full offense but your writing style is for you and nobody else. Use the words you want to use; play with language, experiment, use said, use adverbs, use “unrealistic” writing patterns, slap words you don’t even know are words on the page. Language is a sandbox and you, as the author, are at liberty to shape it however you wish. Build castles. Build a hovel. Build a mountain on a mountain or make a tiny cottage on a hill. Whatever it is you want to do. Write.
