UntetheredDreams

Writeblr. 18+. I'm queer, poc, and write weird things that contain but are not limited to: fantasy, horror, queer characters, speculative fiction, crimes, murder, and so, so much angst.

[untethereddreams]

Writeblr Introduction!

Hi everybody! I’ve been lurking on Writeblr for ages but, since I just finished school, I finally have time and the spoons to make my writeblr introduction! I’ve already reblogged a lot of reference, advice, resources, and inspiration posts on this blog, both for my own use and for anyone with similar interests, but now I’m going to post my own writing as well. 

I’m a queer, poc writer and artist working out of North America. My writing style tends toward weird fiction and fantasy, which means that I read and write a lot of horror, fantasy, urban fantasy, and speculative pieces. I’m most comfortable with short fictions (the shorter the better!) but am dipping my toes into long-form fiction with several novel projects. I also recently fell in love with writing screenplays, so that may rear its head sporadically here as well. I also run a short poetry insta (@un.tethered.dreams) and have plans for several blogging projects as well (updates to come)! 

Beyond creative fiction, I am also fascinated with the craft of writing, what it takes, why some things work and some don’t, etc. I spent some years going to uni for neuroscience in a different life so science, particularly biology, is an ongoing interest. I also draw traditional art and am learning digital art, so you might see some of that on this blog as well. (Can you tell that I have a problem with overcommitment yet?)

My current projects/priorities include:

The Walls Have Ears and Thorns (Working Title)

Genre: Fantasy

Length: Novel (series?)

Stage: Worldbuilding/First Draft

Set in the world of Chinese Wuxia novels with themes and elements from both Chinese history and Western high fantasy, The Walls Have Ears and Thorns follows Yinning (隐宁), our asexual and non-binary protagonist, as they struggle to reconcile past sins, political intrigue, and the possibility that, despite everything, they are deserving of love. 

Tags: walls have ears and thorns, wip wheat

Translation/retellings of Chinese history/myth/folklore (taking suggestions for a better title)

Genre: non-fiction

Length: undetermined, one-shots

Stage: planning/testing

Translations and retellings of stories from ancient Chinese history. These will come out of both Chinese history/reference books and from my own childhood. I'm currently gauging interest in the project and planning how it will work with Patreon and/or Ko fi (because I am currently unemployed and want to build toward self-employment in the creative field). More info here. First sample retelling here. Second retelling here. More details to come.

Tags: chinese history, retellings, translation project (proper project tag to come with new title)

Herbiary Tarot

Genre: fantasy, reference

Length: Book + card deck

Stage: research

Almost done my research of tarot cards and their interpretations based on the decks I have and reference books. The vision for the final project will be a series of linked drabbles related to each card that lead the reader on an exploration of an imagined realm masquerading as the mundane, rather like how bestiaries look to us now. I’m still undecided whether the drabbles will segue into a plotted story told in snapshots. Next step is deciding whether the deck will be high fantasy or urban fantasy.

Tags: herbiary tarot wip, herbalism tarot wip, herbal tarot wip, tarot wip

Trouble (Working Title)

Genre: Urban Fantasy

Length: Novel (series?)

Stage: Worldbuilding/First Draft

When her aunt Cynthia disappears, leaving only a mysterious voice-mail message, Selena must abandon her life as a university student and bookstore clerk and embrace her heritage as one of the Morriganna, ancient prophets of war and doom, in order to stay alive and save her family. Her first task: decide if she can trust the young man who walked into her bookstore, the latest heir and black sheep to a family of Morriganna hunters. 

Tags: wip trouble

Daily Flash Fiction

Genre: flash fiction, micro fiction

Length: self-contained

Starting next week, I’ll be committing to writing six pieces of flash fiction a week (one per day plus a rest day). The goal is to get into the rhythm of writing regularly. I’ll be posting these works on my blog and cross-posting here as well. For inspiration, I’ll be working my way through Wikipedia’s list of phobias.

Tags: my writing, flash fiction, short fiction

[homunculus-argument]

My dash is full of struggling writers rn.

[leave-her-a-tome]

Comes in late with starbucks <3

#

Please do NOT repost my art

[bucketofdeltav]

So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.

[melyzard]

[elodieunderglass]

@bucketofdeltav says the URL is here: http://tumblr.com/star-system-generator

okay it has its own blog now (@star-system-generator) on Tumblr

Follow @star-system-generator and get more of the good stuff by joining Tumblr today. Dive in!

[careydraws]

No, seriously,

[creekfiend]

if you ever hear me say "a fairy is when something terrible that we don't understand happens," this is what I am talking about. that's a fairy. a fairy is a explanation for the psychological significance of something we can't really fathom.

this is my deepest most basic thesis about Stories. tbqh.

[guiltfactory-moved]

this lamb keeps trying to sacrifice itself even though no one really needs or wants it to do that

[talesfromthecrypts]

“They said they wanted a vampire relationship with no age gap”

“No age gap??!?!?”

“And no non-con elements”

“NO NON CON?”

“And no coercion or otherwise manipulative behaviors”

“Joe they want a vampire with NOTHING”

[ecc-poetry]

“La sirena y el pescador,” Elisa Chavez.

Hey all! This poem is part of my chapbook Miss Translated, which I produced in a limited run as Town Hall Seattle’s Spring 2017 artist-in-residence. The main conceit behind this work is that to accurately portray my relationship with Spanish, I have to explore the pain and ambiguity of not speaking the language of my grandparents and ancestors. As a result, these poems are bilingual … sort of. Each one is translated into English incorrectly.

The poems I produced have secrets, horrific twists, emotional rants, and confessions hiding in the Spanish. It’s my hope that people can appreciate them regardless of their level of Spanish proficiency.

[kranja]

oh shit.  my spanish is pretty shaky, but i’m pretty sure “te perdono” is “i forgive you.”  wow understanding just that much is pretty chilling.

and something about…blood? and transformation?  oooh yikes.  she didn’t want legs in the spanish version did she.  and it was a painful process.

so this poem is about…misunderstandings leading to pain for the person misunderstood?  whish is really effective with the way it’s written, wow.  this is the most meta poem form i’ve ever seen.  wow.

[ecc-poetry]

#reblog#photoset#poetry#i later ran it thru google translate to confirm my theories#won’t post said translation or say how right i was#cuz i feel like that’s missing the point

<— This right here is AMAZING. Look at the journey this person went on reading my poem! Secret fact, I have been stalking tags and reblogs of this because what I wanted more than anything was to provide an experience for people and LOOK AT YOU ALL GO. Your engagement and enthusiasm is amazing and so humbling for me.

[featherquillpen]

Holy crap, this is incredible. As a natively bilingual Latina woman, allow me to dive into a full analysis.

First, I should tell you my experience of reading this. I didn’t even look at the English at first, because I didn’t know that the mistranslation was the point, and of course I didn’t need it. So I read the whole poem in Spanish and thought it was really sad and moving. Then I looked at the English and my eyebrows went right up to my hairline. Why the hell would you translate it this way, I thought. 

Then I read the caption and realized that this is a genius way of demonstrating how translation into English can be an act of colonization and violence.

I would translate the first two lines as “The mermaid rose from the sea / To see the dry world.” They’re very neutral lines. She was curious about the dry world, so she went to check it out. That’s a very different connotation from the mistranslation, which tells you that the mermaid preferred the land to the sea.

The second two lines I would say mean “She found a fisherman on the beach / this beautiful fish without a net.” She’s the one with agency here, not the fisherman, and she thinks of herself as a free fish, unconstrained by a net, not as a fish without a home.

The next three lines by my lights read “She had a gleaming tail; scales / that covered her breasts, arms, and face / and a wake of lacy waves.” Again, it’s from her perspective, not the fisherman’s, and she thinks of herself as having a gleaming rather than oily tail, a lacy wake rather than a frothing one.

Next stanza: “The fisherman caught her by the tail / and cut it in half.” From her point of view, the fisherman has committed a sudden and senseless mutilation. Then he goes, “’Now,’ he said to her, ‘you have legs. / Why don’t you walk?’” It’s almost like an accusation. You have legs now, why don’t you just get up and walk?

My read on the next stanza is: “The mermaid began to sing to the sea / for aid, her blood transforming / the sand of the beach into rainbows.” The sea is her home, not the land, and she’s crying out to her home in pain as she bleeds.

Then the poem ends with “She sang to the fisherman, ‘I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.’”

The reason this mistranslation is so brilliant is that it takes a story about a mermaid trying to forgive a man who’s committed senseless violence against her, and turns it into a story about a man who uplifts a woman to a better life out of the kindness of his heart. And the thing is, that’s exactly what happens to so many stories from colonized cultures when they’re adapted by the oppressor. Translation into English, and further the cultural language of the oppressor, can be an act of violence and erasure rather than one of respect.

This is why I have worked so hard to translate poetry from Spanish to English that has previously only been translated by white Americans who learned Spanish in college. I can bring something to the translation that they can’t. It’s usually not this extreme, but this exists to some degree in all translations by people who don’t truly understand the culture that produced the work they’re translating.

[homunculus-argument]

Random worldbuilding: there's a region in the country with a strong culture of offering homecooked dishes as gifts for all occasion. And over time, they have accumulated an entire category of dishware that aren't any particular individual's property - they are constantly in rotation, being gifted and re-gifted as the dish holding a pie, a casserole, loaf of bread, the list goes on. Once a gift dish is in your possession, you need to make something in it as a gift in return - not necessarily to the one you received it from, but to someone nonetheless.

They're called lovers' dishes, but not for any romantic reasons. The name was adopted after people started deeming the previous name, courtesan bowls, inappropriate. The term courtesan bowl was also a slightly more cleaned-up term replacing a previous one, as the dishware were originally known as slut cups. As they, you understand, they get around.

[liarsblade]

There's this perception, I've noticed, that if you're going to have a cultural conception of something like "mental health" in your fictional setting it has to be like Ideal, it needs to be the ideal version of mental health awareness/conception/care or it needs to not exist at all even a little. Does that make sense.

[liarsblade]

Similarly there's also this idea that either a character knows what therapy is, has had some, and has had an overwhelmingly positive experience and result from it, or they have literally no concept of therapy at all, like Harry Du Bois not knowing that he's a cop style. Total blank. Very odd.

[liarsblade]

The options are not "this story takes place in the Instagram infographic universe" or "you get nothing. Everyone has a caveman's understanding of what depression is." is all I'm saying. Make a setting with a concept of mental health that sucks. Send the character to therapy that doesn't work. Officially diagnose them with something that sucks and is absolutely going to be taken out of the in-universe dsm in a couple of editions. Try something difference.

[dollsome-does-tumblr]

talk about a sentence 💖

[moponpompom]

werewolf transformation but the jaws come out of the humans collarbone and grow and close over their head, consider it

[ramblinglunaticssramblings]

Was it casual when you threw us off a cliff with your arms wrapped around me because you couldn't live with or without me?

[wordfather]

[freeze frame] yeah thats me. you're probably wondering how i got here. me too. i dont remember anything ever so i need to see this as much as you do [unfreeze frame]

[magic-is-something-we-create]

I made an improper post about it in the dead of night last night but for everyone who wasn't online at that time:

YA BOY FINISHED WRITING THE MILLENNIUM SAGA BOOK 4!!!!!! 🎉🎉🎉

(this draft. theres some massive edits that need to happen and a less than 1k epilogue to write still. BUT!!!!)

it clocks in at 147,007 words right now, after a year and a half of work :)

[ambiguouspuzuma]

Congratulations! 👏👏👏

[magic-is-something-we-create]

Thank you!!!! :D

[glassshine]

yo bro do the thing