Letters from Laura

Graduate student, occasional writer, and huge nerd/fangirl. Fuelled mainly by tea and biscuits. This is where I procrastinate.

[toastyteakettle]

Everything was getting a bit cluttered so fancied a bit of a clean start if anyone is still here and wants to keep following!

[cherchezlafatfemme]

This year we're not doing weight loss resolutions. No new fad diets or miracle workout programs, no magic pills, and definitely no bariatric surgeries. This year we're listening to our bodies, and more importantly we're loving our bodies. We do not need to be smaller to be worthy of that.

[phoenixflames12]

This year's Christmas Special for All Creatures Great and Small has officially broken my heart completely and mended it at the same time. 'North Pole Vetinary Surgery for wounded reindeer,' indeed.

[bulkhummus]

I LOVE BED

[bulkhummus]

I LOVE PILLOW

[bulkhummus]

I LOVE BLANKEY

[wilwheaton]

What have you done, America?

I am anguished, I am heartbroken, I am afraid of what’s coming for people I love. I am shocked that my country just gave 247 years of Democracy away over one night. We live in a different country now, than we did when we woke up, yesterday. Exactly how violent and cruel and hateful this new country is has yet to be revealed, but it’s going to be pretty terrible. I fought hard to prevent this. We…

What have you done, America?

[polyvinylfilms]

Joe Biden is still our President today.

He also has more power (Supreme Court gave) than he used to have. Perhaps he can throw several wrenches in the works.

[wilwheaton]

I hope he does, but he just doesn't seem to be the kind of person who would.

[toastyteakettle]

Just when you think Americans couldn’t possibly be that stupid TWICE. Fucking hell.

I normally try to keep this blog more on the positive side and away from the personal but I’m so disappointed and angry right now. And it’s not even my country.

Feels like everything’s fucked.

[irishmansdaughter]

[shrined-deactivated20211113]

*forgets to message back* *forgets to check notifications* *forgets to look through bookmarks* *forgets to check reminders* *forgets to check out [insert content] that i said i would* *forgets to take my phone off do not disturb* *forgets to

[introsquirrel]

County roads

Full of holes

On the route

I need to go

Road construction

Lane obstruction

Let me go

County roads

[contagiousgrace]

it's not that I need a quiet day or a day off exactly; it's that I need a pocket of time that exists entirely outside of linear time as we know it that would allow me to get things done without time passing in the real world, and frankly, I don't think that's too much to ask.

[gingiekittycat]

I forgot how lonely it is to write original fiction.

Where are the kudos? The subscriptions? The comments? The people cheerleading me chapter to chapter? Where are the kind words and compliments and reassurances that what I'm writing isn't complete crap? Where are the unhinged emojis? The asks on Tumblr? Where are my mutuals in my dms apologizing for not reading the latest chapter right away (side note, you know you don't have to apologize at all, right??). Where is the fanart? Where are the recs?

Where is my motivation to keep going?

It's something I've been thinking about a lot, actually, lately. How the experience of writing fanfic is so unique. How you already have an audience, willing and waiting and captive. And that's really it, isn't it? You have an audience. It's almost performative, writing fanfic. It's being on a stage, a one-person show (or two, if you do it with a friend); it's getting live reactions to your performance, it's feeding off the energy of the crowd and informing it back in a feedback loop; it's improvised, sometimes, in almost-real-time. It's building something that you couldn't have built by yourself. A thing that takes on a life of its own.

It's an experience you can't get writing original fiction, and, honestly, not having it is making it hard to write something original at all.

[dduane]

"Where is my motivation to keep going?"

It's where it always was before fanfic, before online support; before recs, before asks, before moots, before fanart.

It's in realizing you're the story's only way out into the world.

In a world full of gatekeeping, this is the gate that only you keep. Turn your back on the responsibility to open the portal to the unborn (original) story and keep it open, and the story dies. And that death is on you.

Yes, it's lonely work, without the constant rush of input we've been trained to be used to. It's been lonely work for a long time: since the first storyteller came up against the silence that wanted to keep the story away from the breath that would make it real in other people's ears. And you could make a case that all the online adornments are just our recent generations' way of keeping both the storytellers and the listeners from being overwhelmed by that loneliness. (Because the listeners have their own version of it: the fear of what happens when the people who can tell stories fall silent. Good storytellers respect that fear, and remember every day their responsibility to do something about it.)

Where do the characters come from? A surprising amount of the time, without warning, they muscle their way into the back of your brain and grab you by the hand (or hair) (or throat) and shout Tell about me! You have to tell them, there's no one else who can do it! ...Sometimes you have to sneak up on them from behind, as you do get the shy ones occasionally whom you have to take by the hand and pull into the light. But give them enough silence—build the space for them—and they'll come.

The silence may be key. One of the smartest pieces of advice I was ever given was that, for half an hour in the morning every day, before starting work, I should sit down and do nothing, and listen. No music, no TV, no news, no reading, no nothing. Sit and listen. It's not meditation; it's not mindfulness. It's listening. Story's voice can be hard to hear, sometimes, until you get better at pushing aside all that relentless rush of situational and sensorial input, and better at waiting to hear the story that's as yet too frail to push its way through the portal without assistance.

To be clear: Fanfic work (or any work in universes not of your making) is a different kind of listening. Working well in already-extant universes requires sharp attention to the tones, concerns and qualities of voices already speaking there; and to a certain extent, to the voices speaking about them. And if you love the characters, too—one of the best reasons for fanfic, really—that's a pleasure.

But when working in your own universes, the listening also requires a selective quality, as the characters find their voices and their proper passions. And as for the love... you're the only one there is to love them, till you get them out into the world. If you've ever been the only one to love somebody, you know how tough that can be.

Then add to that the fillip that those people (or situations) won't be really real until you've worked with them long enough, hard enough, all by yourself? It's a tough row to hoe. And you can't ever be really sure that a summer will come to reveal whether the crop's taken root, and whether it's all been worthwhile.

Nonetheless: it's good work. Some of us don't seem able to stop. Some of us even like it that way.

When you're ready, take that leap and come join us.

[gingiekittycat]

Gosh, this is such brilliant and inspiring advice.

You're right, of course. And you echo a sentiment that so many others have added to this post: that I have to keep remembering why I write at all. No matter if it's original or fanfic, I write because I have to. I just have to. I can't explain why. And maybe it's because of what you said; maybe there is something "alive" about the stories in my head, though it feels equally terrifying and exhilarating to think of it like that. That those stories, the characters, live and die by my hand. That's some responsibility, eh?

Anyway, thank you so much for this addition. I'm going to keep coming back to it whenever I feel like giving up.

[mienar]

dreaming of doing chores in my personal little village

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[laurasimonsdaughter]

Abandoned nests didn’t happen nearly as much nowadays, what with the new preservation regulations, so naturally June had sat in front of the incubator all night. She wasn’t even aware it was no longer night until Seth arrived.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Have you slept at all?”

“I don’t want it to hatch all alone!” June protested, rubbing her eyes. She ducked her head to peek through the glass door of the incubator. The glittering purple egg sat unmoving under the dim light. “Not that anything happened,” she yawned. “I bet it was waiting for you.”

Seth made an amused, but deeply sceptical noise in reply. “Have you eaten at all?” he pivoted back to her generally inadvisable life choices.

“You found it,” June evaded with an accusatory wag of her finger. “You wait and see, it waited to hatch until you were here.”

“That isn’t a thing,” he argued, making his way to the little kitchenette.

“You see if it isn’t a thing!” June looked at the egg again. It didn’t have any identifiable markers on it so there was no telling what might hatch out of it. But it must be a sizeable dragon. The egg was as big as a fresh coconut.

Seth sat down beside her and silently held a bowl out to her, with his eyes raised meaningfully in response to her half-uttered protest. June looked down at the bowl. Apple slices in honey.

“Oh!” she took the bowl rather awkwardly, looking away from Seth’s smug expression. “Thank you! Sorry for forgetting. Sweet new year.”

He smiled, clinking his own bowl against hers before also peering through the little window. “So when will it hatch?”

“If I knew that I wouldn’t have had to—”

CRACK

Seth started back with eyes wide as saucers.

“Didn’t I effing tell you!” June cried in a half-whisper, bouncing out of her seat with excitement. She carefully opened the door to the incubator, heart pounding. There was a bright, shiny bit of horn poking through the purple shell.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Seth choked beside her.

“There they are!”

A tiny muzzle poked impatiently through the cracking eggshell, gleaming little claws soon to follow.

“Oh it’s a silverscale…” June breathed. “Oh my… Seth, look.”

Very slowly she slid out the tray, just in time for the baby dragon to emerge fully from its egg, kicking triumphantly at its remnants with its back paws. The scales on its underside were a very dark blue, but its horns and claws and all the glittering scales along the top of its head and its back were a beautiful silver. The little dragon sat up, looking left and right with a remarkably round snoot and fixed its shining pale eyes on Seth.

For a moment all three of them seemed to hold their breath and then the hatchling leapt straight onto Seth’s shoulder. He nearly reeled backwards and June propped him up, barely containing her excitement. The little dragon gave an authoritative squawk and bonked it’s little horned head against Seth’s yaw.

“Ow,” he protested, temporarily shaken out of his bewilderment. The dragon squawked again.

“What did I tell you,” June said, half smug, half jealous, and one hundred percent delighted. “Bonded to you from the start.”

Seth didn’t answer. He sat very still for a moment and then, very slowly, lifted the bowl of sliced apple up to his shoulder. The little dragon peered down at it, wobbled, and then stuck its head fully into the bowl to begin scarfing down apple.

“Oh…” June laughed, grinning at Seth’s helpless expression. “You are going to be absolutely besotted with this one.”

[nochiquinn]

I feel like the line between “fluffy uwu self care” and “get your shit together self care” is thinner than people seem to think. Like, sitting in a quiet space with a book and maybe some twinkly fairy lights gives me the spoons to go call my damn doctor like I’ve been meaning to. Bath bombs or shower steamers make me feel content and/or sparkly, which gives me confidence to go out in public. (Plus, I bathed.) I dye my hair funky colors so if I feel like people are staring at me I can say it’s at that instead of whatever my anxiety wants it to be. 

The two are not mutually exclusive, is what I’m getting at, and I never see that mentioned, just either “self care is being nice to yourself” or “self care is kicking yourself in the ass to function for a few hours”. Kick yourself in the ass with niceness.

[toastyteakettle]

Sudden Light

I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore. You have been mine before,— How long ago I may not know: But just when at that swallow's soar Your neck turn'd so, Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore. Has this been thus before? And shall not thus time's eddying flight Still with our lives our love restore In death's despite, And day and night yield one delight once more?

- Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

[road-rhythm]

One of the things that bothers me about moral panics about fiction is that there really are conversations we need to be having about the ways some kinds of media—algorithmically driven ones in particular—are indeed constructing our reality to a degree never before seen, and what it means to exist as a human being in an era where the internet has become infrastructure nearly as essential and ubiquitous as roads but is created and governed almost entirely by highly corporate entities that concentrate capital on a virtually incomprehensible scale and have absolutely no incentives to prioritize anything other than profits. Like, yes, under surveillance capitalism, there is a meaningful sense in which your consent to what content you will be exposed to is being coerced on a regular basis.

But fiction isn’t where it’s happening. It’s just not. If anything, recreational fiction is the one place where your freedom to nope out of something uncomfortable remains intact.

Exercise it.

[ohjessmarie]

some cozy nighttime prints available in my inprnt shop 😴🍵🌙