#prose + forrest

[gravekeeps]

@softkillins asked " i could be your toy " from petra .

" big thing to offer when you don't know how i like to play. "

[gravekeeps]

he stretches his head from one side to the other with graceful nonchalance, turning his attention to her as she addresses him from across the kitchen island where she stood at the sink. the room floods with silence for a short moment after the water turns off, and he pushes himself up from the barstool he'd been seated at in front of his laptop. " oh, " sympathy flashes across his countenance, his large digits sweeping into the bowl in front of him and grabbing the key fob for the sleek black car parked out front. " yeah, of course. you .. ready now ? "

closed  for  @gravekeeps .

“   uhm -   i  really  don't  want  to  bother  you ,  but ...   do  you  think  you  could  give  me  a  ride  home ?   “   nova  glances  over  her  shoulder  as  she  finishes  cleaning  the  last  dish  and  turns  off  the  water .   “   my  car  broke  down  a  few  days  ago ,   and  i  don't  want  to  walk  alone  this  late  at  night .   “   it  isn't  entirely  a  lie  —   her  car  had  broken  down ,   but  it  was  already  fixed .   she  just  needed  an  excuse  to  be  alone  with  them . 

[mariacallous]

In the summer of 2008, I was 19 years old, halfway through college, and an aspiring poet with a notebook full of earnest stanzas of questionable quality. I loved writing. I loved literature. As I considered what sort of career might suit me, I became curious about the life of a book editor. So I made my way to New York City for an internship I had received at a major publishing house. Joining me were four other interns—two Black women and two Asian women. The idea was to open industry doors to students from backgrounds underrepresented in the field.

I felt primed for the experience, fresh from a transformative college course that introduced me to the history of Black American letters, anchored by The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Published in 1996 by W. W. Norton and edited by the scholars Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, the book traversed three centuries of writing, from the Negro spirituals of the 18th century to the poetry and prose of the late 20th century. This was the volume, many said, that had assembled and indexed a Black American literary canon for the first time. Toward the anthology’s close, I found myself spellbound by Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel, Sula, and intrigued by a single line in her biography: Not long after she published her first novel, “Morrison became a senior editor at Random House.”

I’d never known that Morrison had straddled the line between writer and editor. Perhaps naively, I hadn’t envisioned that someone could do both jobs at once, especially a writer of Morrison’s caliber. And I didn’t know then how many of the writers who surrounded her in the Norton volume—Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Leon Forrest, Toni Cade Bambara—as well as figures beyond the anthology, such as Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Huey P. Newton, had relied on Morrison to usher their books into the world. I certainly did not appreciate how dynamic—and complicated—both the art and the business of those collaborations had been for her.

Now readers can discover Morrison the bold and dogged editor, thanks to a deeply researched and illuminating new book, Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, by Dana A. Williams, a scholar of African American literature and the dean of Howard University Graduate School. Decades of path-clearing and advocacy had preceded the Norton anthology, and Morrison, as the first Black woman to hold a senior editor position at the prominent publishing house, had played a major part. In a 2022 interview, Gates remarked that Random House’s hiring of Morrison, at the height of the civil-rights movement, was “probably the single most important moment in the transformation of the relationship of Black writers to white publishers.”

A pronouncement like that runs the risk of hyperbole, but Williams’s meticulous and intimate account of Morrison’s editorial tenure backs up the rhetoric. How Morrison handled the pressures of wielding her one-of-a-kind influence is fascinating—and, in retrospect, telling: As an editor, she was not just tenacious, but also always aware of how tenuous progress in the field could be. And it still can be: The recent departures of prominent Black editors and executives who helped diversify publishing’s ranks after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 are a stark reminder of that.

Morrison’s arrival at Random House in the late 1960s, a fraught and fertile moment, was well timed, though her route there wasn’t direct. She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931 in the midwestern steel town of Lorain, Ohio, to parents who, like so many millions of Black Americans in that era, had fled the racial violence of the South in search of safety and economic opportunities farther north. They recognized their daughter’s brilliance early (as did teachers) and began scraping together money to make college possible. Morrison went to Howard, majoring in English, minoring in classics, and throwing herself into theater. After getting a master’s degree in American literature from Cornell University and teaching at Texas Southern University, she went back to Howard in 1957 and spent seven years in the English department. She joined a writing group, whose members loved some pages she shared about a young Black girl who wishes her eyes were blue—the seeds of her debut novel, The Bluest Eye.

Morrison also married, had a child, and divorced, before returning home to Ohio in 1964, pregnant and in search of a new start. One day not long after, three copies of the same issue of The New York Review of Books were accidentally delivered, carrying an ad for an executive-editor job at a small textbook publisher in Syracuse that had recently been acquired by Random House. Morrison’s mother said the mistake was a sign that she should apply. Morrison’s first novel was still several years off, and she needed a steady job that would allow her to focus on her writing in the evenings. She was hired and spent a few years at the publisher before it was fully absorbed by Random House, one of whose top executives had been struck by her intellect and editorial adroitness. She was soon offered a job as an editor on the trade, or general interest, side. She accepted.

Amid racial upheaval and widespread student protests, Black studies and African studies were on the rise, transforming how the history, literature, and culture of the Black diaspora were taught. “I thought it was important for people to be in the streets,” Morrison later said. “But that couldn’t last. You needed a record. It would be my job to publish the voices, the books, the ideas of African Americans. And that would last.”

Her galvanizing insight as an editor was that “a good writer,” as Williams puts it, “could show the foolishness of racism,” as well as the many facets of Black life, “without talking to or about white people at all.” Morrison came to appreciate the power of directly exploring the inner and outer dimensions of Black life as she edited two groundbreaking anthologies: one that brought together some of the best African fiction writers, poets, and essayists, Contemporary African Literature, and another called The Black Book, which documented Black American history and daily experience through archival documents, cultural artifacts, and photographs. A frustration with the focus she found in the work of some homegrown Black writers also shaped her thinking. As she said later,

I realized that with all the books I’d read by contemporary Black American writers—men that I admired, or was sometimes disturbed by—I felt they were not talking to me. I was sort of eavesdropping as they talked over my shoulder to the real (white) reader. Take Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: That title alone got me. Invisible to whom?

Morrison recognized, Williams writes, that this “editorial aesthetic” of hers made her work harder. Famous for giving its editors unusual freedom, Random House was all for unearthing new writers and creating a new readership. Still, reaching a general audience remained a trade publisher’s mandate. A salesman at a conference once told Morrison, “We can’t sell books on both sides of the street”: There was an audience of white readers and, maybe, an audience of Black readers, he meant, but those literary worlds didn’t merge. “Well, I’ll just solve that,” Morrison decided. She was determined to “do something that everybody loves” without losing sight of her commitment to Black readers.

To pull off that feat, Morrison’s mode was to be relentlessly demanding—of herself, her authors, and her Random House colleagues. She tailored her rigorous style to the varied array of Black writers she didn’t hesitate to pitch to her bosses. But whether she was editing her high-profile nonfiction authors—Newton, the Black Panther leader, and others—or largely unknown and highly unconventional fiction writers, among them Gayl Jones, her protective impulse stands out.

As they worked on their books with Morrison, Newton as well as the activist Davis resisted the pressure to lean into the sort of personal reflections the public was curious about, and she supported them, while insisting that their thinking be clearly laid out. For Newton’s 1972 collection of writings, To Die for the People, that meant tossing weak early essays and reediting the rest, even those that had already been published. But her aim was not to present his ideas “all smoothed out,” Williams writes. Morrison emphasized that “contradictions are useful” in accurately tracing the evolution of the Black Panther Party away from a focus on armed revolution and toward the goal of creating social infrastructure within communities, offering programs such as free breakfast for students. She felt that a reflective Newton should emerge from the book’s pages. Aware of the public narrative that positioned the Panthers as unhinged, violent racial nationalists, Morrison encouraged him to describe “what he believes are errors in judgment in the Party line behavior.”

She worked more intimately with Davis, whom she sought out right after Davis’s acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy (resulting from a courthouse raid in which guns that were registered to Davis were used). For a time, Davis even moved in with Morrison and her two sons, then living in Spring Valley, New York. As they progressed through what became Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), their friendship seems to have made Morrison fiercer in deflecting calls for more personal revelation (which she considered sexist code for sensational romantic-life details). She bridled at one reader’s report asking for, among other things, more signs of Davis’s “humanness” in the draft. In a memo to Random House’s editor in chief, Morrison remarked that humanness is “a word white people use when they want to alter an ‘uppity’ or ‘fearless’ ” Black person.

At the same time, she pushed Davis for more vivid storytelling, and less academic vagueness in her account of her political life, her time in prison, her trial. At one point, Morrison chided her that “humanity is a vague word in this context,” evidently referring to Davis’s discussion of incarceration:

You repeat the idea frequently throughout so it is pivotal. “Breaking will” is clear; forcing prisoners into childlike obedience is also clear; but what is erode their humanity. Their humaneness? Their natural resistance?

Morrison bore down on publicity for the book too, famous though its author already was. She secured a blurb from the well-known British leftist Jessica Mitford, who wrote about prison reform too. Still, Morrison’s commitment to Black readership was unrelenting, and Random House arranged to provide hosts of book parties for Davis in Black communities with copies at a 40 percent discount. The party conveners could sell them at regular price and keep the profit.

Always on the lookout for new talent, Morrison asked friends who taught in creative-writing departments to send promising work by their students her way. In 1973, she dug into a box of manuscripts sent by the poet Michael Harper at Brown University. The writer was Gayl Jones, then in her early 20s, and Morrison was stunned by her narratively experimental prose. “This girl,” she felt, “had changed the terms, the definitions of the whole enterprise” of novel writing. Morrison, confessing that she was “green with envy,” immediately set up a meeting with Jones and soon persuaded the higher-ups at Random House to give her a book deal. She and Jones turned first to the draft of a novel titled Corregidora, which tackled the sexual exploitation of women entrapped in slavery, and its psychological and spiritual toll, in a more devastating and effective way than Morrison had ever encountered.

Spurred on by her fervent belief in Jones’s talent, Morrison was determined to ensure that Corregidora made an impression, well aware of how a successful debut could define a fiction writer’s career—particularly that of a Black woman fiction writer. She set exacting standards, bluntly calling Jones out when she thought she was taking shortcuts: “For example, Ursa’s song ought to be a straight narrative of childhood sexual fears,” she wrote to Jones, and went on: “May Alice and the boys—the fragments are really a cop out. You know—being too tired or impatient to write it out.” Understanding how shy Jones was, Morrison joined her for interviews and used her own literary capital (Sula had recently appeared to acclaim) to advocate for her work. “No novel about any black woman can ever be the same after this,” Morrison declared in a 1975 article in Mademoiselle.

Two years later, with the publication of Song of Solomon, Morrison also saw how her stature could get in the way. “In terms of new kinds of writing, the marketplace receives only one or two Blacks,” she later lamented in an interview in Essence magazine, wishing that the books she edited and published sold as well as the ones she wrote. In 1978, after the publication of Jones’s second novel, Eva’s Man, and a story collection, White Rat, Morrison’s once-close relationship with her unraveled amid mounting tensions with Jones’s partner; he had begun to represent Jones, and his behavior had become ever more erratic and aggressive.

By then, Morrison had just published a second novel by Leon Forrest, whose debut, There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, had been a daunting, and thrilling, foray into novel-editing for her, back at the start of the decade. Together they had worked on an introductory section, describing the novel’s large cast of characters, not just to help readers but to orient Morrison herself as she went through the whole manuscript—and to get Random House’s editor in chief to offer Forrest a contract. With a foreword by Ralph Ellison (Morrison saw that two pages of comments he’d sent in would serve that purpose well), the novel was hailed for its risk taking and, Williams writes, for dwelling “in Blackness without reducing Blackness to an object of racism.” Though Forrest’s books lost money, Morrison’s support never wavered, and Random House, following her lead, stuck with him.

After scaling back on editing for a while, Morrison officially left Random House in 1983. She was eager to stop working on her fiction at night and “in the automobile and places like that,” she joked, and also to stop feeling “guilty that I’ve taken some time away from a full-time job.” The hard-driving editorial mission that had defined nearly two decades of Morrison’s life had never been peripheral for her—and hindsight reveals what a versatile catalyst she’d been in American literary culture. Though her departure was a boon for her own writing, it came at a cost. The number of Black authors who were published by Random House nose-dived after she left.

That probably didn’t come as a big surprise to Morrison. Seven years earlier, speaking at a conference on the past and future of Black writing in the United States, she had a message for the audience of major Black writers and critics: Don’t expect structural racism within and beyond publishing to disappear—but also don’t let that stop you. “I think that the survival of Black publishing, which to me is a sort of way of saying the survival of Black writing, will depend on the same things that the survival of Black anything depends on,” she said, “which is the energies of Black people—sheer energy, inventiveness and innovation, tenacity, the ability to hang on, and a contempt for those huge, monolithic institutions and agencies which do obstruct us. In other words, we must do our work.”

[ambermaitrejean]

Tucked beneath a blanket of glittering stars, Forrest Evergreen settled in for a pleasant evening before his warm, crackling fire. It was quiet on the mountainside, except for the occasional call of the neighboring owls waking for their nightly activity and the lone coyote singing to the stars from the valley below. It was peaceful here on his mountainside, giving Forrest a deep sense of contentment and gratitude to be alive in this wonderous wilderness, to dream under a heaven of stars, to roam these mountains and valleys, to breathe the fresh air, to listen to the song of life all around him, and to know that although life was short, he had been gifted a beautiful existence and that somewhere, in all of creation, he was loved.

gif and prose by Amber Maitrejean

[daughterofheartshaven]

I'm bored and low spoons and @presidentdisastraofgallifrey just informed me that a) Rozlyn Forrester just became one of their favorite companions and b) they'd love a reading list of Roz Forrester stuff. And making that doesn't take much spoons.

So here we go.

The Rozlyn Forrester comprehensive breakdown

So firstly if you want a complete list of stories featuring Roz's run as a companion, here you go:

Original Sin

Sky Pirates!

Zamper

Toy Soldiers

Head Games

The Also People

Shakedown

Just War

Warchild

SLEEPY

Death and Diplomacy

Happy Endings

GodEngine

Christmas on a Rational Planet

Return of the Living Dad

Cold Fusion

Short Trips: 2040 (a short story prose collection that contains two stories starring Roz)

The Trial of a Time Machine (Big Finish audio story)

Vanguard (BF audio)

The Jabari Countdown (BF audio)

The Dread of Night (BF audio)

The Death of Art

Damaged Goods

So Vile a Sin

aaaaand we also have The Last Day and Decalog 4: Re:Generations, which are both a bit weird and I'll get to later.

Of course, some of these stories are, uh... not good. Here's my breakdown of the books (I haven't read either of the short stories. Talking about the audios later).

Original Sin: pretty dark, but pretty good. Also Roz's origin story and that's important. Does depict a pretty xenophobic and imperialist Earth Empire, and that doesn't get addressed until much later

Sky Pirates!: I didn't like it, but you probably would. Very Douglas Adams-type lunacy. Don't even know how to describe it.

Zamper: Ehhhhhh. It's fine, but it's also written by Transphobe Roberts, so if you're not being a completionist, it's not good enough to be worth your time.

Toy Soldiers: not a good book.

Head Games: I love Head Games, but a lot of people don't. Basically it is an examination of Seven at his worst and why he's like that. It's a decent Roz story but doesn't give her a ton of focus. Also the main antagonist is an entity that breached containment from the Land of Fiction.

The Also People. A masterful story. A masterful Roz story. But you're already reading it so you know that.

Shakedown. Pretty good Terrance Dicks fluff Sontaran/Rutan space story. It's a novelization/expansion of a home video spin off that doesn't have the Doctor in it (Shakedown: Return of the Sontarns is actually really good and can be found on youtube or whatever usually I do recommend) so that's why none of the BBC or Virgin -owned characters are in the middle third.

Just War: A pure historical set in Nazi-occupied space during WWII. Not really my sort of thing. I think it's well written?

Warchild: I've actually never read this one.

SLEEPY: An Earth colony world comes under attack from a mysterious force. I highly recommend, and it helps set up So Vile a Sin (although SVaS works well enough even if you haven't read SLEEPY)

Death and Diplomacy: You know, Roz was probably in this book. Can't remember anything about her from it.

Happy Endings: Fun and good, but, like, Roz isn't really doing anything in it. It does also have Brax and Romana if that's a plus. Neither of them do much either. Although this is the book where Romana is shown to have become president.

GodEngine: REALLY REALLY GOOD. Both from a plot perspective and from a Roz perspective. Highly recommend. Basically this is "what happened on Mars when the Daleks invaded Earth?"

Christmas on a Rational Planet: I do not remember much from this.

Return of the Living Dad: A good book, but not really a standout Roz book. Very focused on Bernice Summerfield and her reunion with her father.

Cold Fusion: YOU NEED TO READ THIS. This is the seventh Doctor/fifth Doctor crossover, and you need Roz and Adric teaming up to take down a scientific megacorp in your life. Like this is one of my favorite Doctor Who books in general, and Roz in excellent form here.

The Death of Art: I could not follow this. Has a few good scenes (including Chris Cwej attempting to impersonate the Doctor

Damaged Goods: A serious contender for most fuckin grimdark thing I've ever read. Like yes, this was RTD's first Who story, and yes, it's gay, but DAMN this thing is too gleefully brutal for its own good.

So Vile a Sin: An extremely good book, an extremely good Roz book, and featuring the very cathartic fall of a very bad empire.

So if you want my Roz Recommendation books that's:

Original Sin

Sky Pirates!

Head Games (only if you're willing to take a risk)

The Also People

Shakedown

SLEEPY

GodEngine

Cold Fusion

So Vile a Sin

As for the audios, they're all right. Worth listening to. I think they get Roz as a character. The Jabari Countdown is probably the best for queer reasons, but none of them are, like, amazing.

And circling back to the two weird things. Decalog 4 is a short story collection that is basically chronicling Roz's family history, from its humble origins in the present day, to being one of the most powerful families in the world in Roz's time a thousand years in the future. I have not read it and it does not actually have Roz herself in it, but, like. It didn't feel complete to talk about this list without it.

And finally, Roz is actually a major player in The Last Day, although since she doesn't show up until halfway through, her involvement is a little spoiler-y. But something to look forward to once you've finished the Gods and Monsters arc.

[tallimorgan]

The Indie Author Hustle

Originally written 07 January 2025

I saw a post on Bluesky yesterday from a fellow indie author—Azalea Forrest—talking about how not every book you write will be good, and not every good book you publish will do well, and sometimes the books you’re less proud of will do better than you expect. Azalea went on to say that regardless of the reception or your personal feelings about your books, each one is still a learning experience, and that is still valuable.

“It’s OK if it takes a while to put out a book. It’s OK to wait, or to shelve. And it’s OK if it’s done and it’s not what you expected or even wanted. It wasn’t a waste. It was an experience.”

This thread got me thinking about my own journey as an indie author and how easily I got swept up in the perceived hustle of self-publishing: this sense of pressure that if we don’t put out something new every few months, we’ll lose relevance and never be successful. Through the lens of social media, we get a warped idea of how much our peers are writing and how quickly they’re publishing, and that translates into a panicked urgency to get the next book out as fast as possible. There’s a lot of emphasis placed on the importance of a successful release day—achieving that ever-coveted orange banner—that often comes with the attitude that release day is the only chance for your book to “make it.”

All of this is, of course, exactly as I said earlier: a perceived reality. It’s true that some authors write faster than others, or have the means to make writing their full-time job rather than balancing it with additional jobs. Hell, if I could write for 7 or 8 hours per day, I’d crank out a book a month too. But I also know that that wouldn’t be my best work. Not unless I combed through that rapid draft with careful and extensive edits.

Something I learned in 2022, the year I released 4 books, is that while I can write a book in a month, fully edit it in another month, and publish it almost immediately after, I shouldn’t. It doesn’t result in my best work. It doesn’t give me time to really sit with that story, get to know those characters, and put the thought and care into my prose that I know I am capable of. Having re-read the books that took me ages to write and the books I wrote quickly, there is an obvious difference in both the quality of my writing and the depth of the stories.

I don’t regret publishing any of my books. There are a couple that I wish I had done differently—those being Sweet Sorrow, which has now been revised, and Truthseeker, which I have complicated feelings about—but I wouldn’t go so far as to say I wish I hadn’t published them at all. Both of those books—as well as the others—absolutely were a learning experience, and my skills are better for having written them.

But let’s talk some more about regrets, second-guessing, and how we’d do it if we could go back, because I know I’m not the only author who thinks about this, but I rarely see people talk about it.

More under the cut:

Self-publishing offers a lot of freedom in a lot of ways, which is both a blessing and a curse; traditionally published authors certainly can’t go back and edit their books with the same ease that I could fix a typo and re-upload my manuscript and then have the fixed version available to buy half a day later. But one of the things I had to learn in my years since publishing my first book, was when to leave well enough alone.

I recently started re-reading my debut, The Oracle Stone, which I published in 2021. At the time, that book was my pride and joy; it was (and still is) very dear to me, my little book baby. I was wholly confident that it was the best thing I’d written and that people would love it.

None of that is technically untrue. At the time, it was the best thing I’d written. People did love it! Oracle got a wider reach than I ever expected, for which I’m incredibly grateful.

But when I started re-reading it a few months ago? I couldn’t finish it.

Yeah. My beloved debut, the book that I struggled to write for like 6 years, starring some of my favorite characters, was so wildly different from my current writing abilities that I could not get past the 20% mark. 

I don’t think it’s bad, but I couldn’t turn off my writer-editor brain and just enjoy the story for its nostalgia. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d reword a sentence here, or enrich a description there. I had not realized how much my writing had grown, and I cringed at the thought of people discovering and reading Oracle but not any of my newer stuff. For a second, I debated unpublishing it entirely and editing it yet again.

But I won’t. Because The Oracle Stone is a product of who I was and what I could write in 2021 (well, technically 2020 since that’s when I finished it), and to tear it apart again would be a disservice to both my past self and to the book itself. Let it remain a time capsule, representative of how far I’ve come and how much I’ve learned.

Knowing when to take down and revisit a book vs when to leave it alone is a tough call. It’s temptingly easy to let my perfectionist tendencies take over and fix every nitpicky thing even after I’ve hit that “submit” button to publish a book. I don’t want to do it with all of my books, and the ones that I am tempted to revisit and fix are, sure enough, the ones that I wrote too fast: Meliora and Sweet Sorrow.

I wrote Meliora in less than one month. It was my Nanowrimo project in 2021, and I was so thrilled to be drafting something easy and new after struggling through editing a different book, that I just took off and sped through it. I then proceeded to edit the whole thing in a matter of weeks the following month, and the only reason I chilled out after that is because I sent it to beta readers and gave them a few months to read. But after that, I sped through another round of edits, and then got everything organized and published it.

Now, I wish I’d slowed down. I wish I’d spent more time getting to know the characters and expanding the world. I wish I’d delved into the story deeper than I did. I flew through that book so fast that I don’t feel like I spent any time with the characters at all. My writing, too, is not as strong as it could have been, and I really feel like I sacrificed quality for the sake of speed with that book.

Despite all of that, Meliora has consistently sold fairly well, and it was my best-selling book in 2024 by a wide margin. Maybe that’s because it’s the most conventionally marketable one of my books, or maybe people crave light and fluffy reads. There certainly is a market for low-stakes, cozy fantasy, but Meliora’s relative success makes me wish even more that I’d taken my time with it.

That being said, my instincts tell me to leave that one be as well. I have some ideas to write other stories in the same universe, possibly revisiting the characters in Meliora, but I was proud of Meliora when I published it and to rewrite it now would, I think, do more harm than good. From a practical, businessy standpoint, it’s simply not a good practice to have too many different versions of my books out there.

Now, Sweet Sorrow is a different story. I wrote, edited, and published that novella all in the span of less than three months, and it shows. The worldbuilding is weak, I did not know the characters well, and—despite my beta readers’ assurance to the contrary—I still think the sex scene is cringe and the pacing is off. All of that alone would have compelled me to rewrite Sweet Sorrow eventually, but now that I’ve written the backstory and gotten a much better understanding of the characters and their connection to each other, Sweet Sorrow is a very different book. It needed that full overhaul that I gave it, and not only does it do better justice to the characters, it does so for readers as well, who would otherwise pick it up after Silver Blood and find 100-something pages of inconsistencies (and less refined writing).

I want to feel proud of the books I publish, and I’m such a perfectionist that I wouldn’t publish something I’m not proud of. But there’s a very different feeling of accomplishment that comes with finishing a book I’ve spent years with rather than months. The Oracle Stone might not be the best example of my skills anymore, but I’m still proud of it as an accomplishment. Every one of my books is an accomplishment in its own right, and I am pleased with each of them and the wisdom they offered me as a result of writing and publishing them. Does that mean I’m 100% happy and satisfied with them all the time? Nope! My feelings about each of my books fluctuate often, but at the end of the day, I’m still proud to call them mine. No one else could have written them, and I wouldn’t be the writer I am now without them.

This became more of a ramble than I expected, so if you've made it this far, thanks for reading!

Check out my books! | Follow me on Bluesky!

[stelladess]

I feel like im not eloquent enough to write up in a manner where im satisfied with the prose my thoughts regarding why chapter 9 is important to the Victoria arc and how Victoria has no moral high ground to Kazdel. But one line I wrote while writing it up that I think is evocative and kinda sums up my thoughts on the matter: "Victoria gilds atrocity with glory and then dares call others savages and murderers." I also have related stuff I wanna write about with how the Nachzehrer king sorta is a counterpart to our dear old duke of Wellington and how well Ursus and Victoria are written as colonial powers and how their colonialist ideals are conveyed. The Black Forrest Wills a Dream has some scenes in it with some Ursus soldiers that feel right out of real life American history about American Indians, or Scandinavian or Russian history about well, the actual real life Sami.

[audrelite]

hi, audre! lisia from the bulbaforums here...

from your writing i've gleaned that you're probably a fan of authors with very rich prose, and i was wondering if you have any books or authors you particularly enjoy like that? love your writing, you're incredible at it :)

Hi Lisia! I'm flattered you like my fic writing!

To answer your question about recommendations, I adore poetry: Edward Hirsch, Theodore Roethke, Anna Akhmatova, Adrienne Rich, Forrest Gander, Czeslaw Milosz... the list goes on. I also love reading aloud quite a few Italian poets as well. As far as novels go, love Fernando Pessoa's seminal work, The Book of Disquiet, a collection of posthumously-published writings that was found in his trunk; the particular edition I have is the Complete Edition, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (a very prolific translator, and one whose translations of many Portuguese works I quite like). And finally, my favorite book of all time, if you consider it a book, is The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. As the title would suggest, it's a dictionary of neologisms (invented words) that seeks to give words to emotions we as humans experience but don't yet have words for (though some languages actually do and have employed a handful of these words).

I hope this answers your question. :-)

[harriertail]

Weird reading roundup

Gravitys Rainbow - ngl i gave up. i adored the writing style- the sidetracking stories, the background, the general insanity and interconnected world- from Argentina to Southwest Africa to Russia to England. I get the whole plot is about this yank who’s dick is connected to nazi rockets and everytime he shags a girl london gets bombed but wtf was that second half? I wanted to enjoy it, but it felt like less of a story/novel and more of a series of characters/events designed to either shock or confuse (much like Less than Zero, Guts, or Infinite Jest though). When this book does moral grandstanding or political views it does it really well, and again the prose is fantastic. A lot of the “chapters” (long segments within each bigger part) could stand on their own as short stories. A shame about all the… that…

Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead - suggested by the lovely pigeocore. Took a while to get into the style and the weird Capitalisations but it really sets this weird, not-right tone. Unhinged in a good way. A murder mystery of the best kind. I hated every character but the narrator. 

Apricots - this was.... weird. the style is very ‘basic’ and kinda jumpy. the dialogue is kinda weird and unnatural. The news clippings were really nice in setting the tone but the random non Forrest chapter was fucking weird. I think the contrast between Grenada and Lebanon rlly should have been played up. This def is one of those non fiction books that are basically the authors memoirs (ala Slaughterhouse Five) so i’ll let it slide on feeling disjointed. It gets a little preachy with the whole “i gave my life for this” and gives speeches in parts but i think the ending justified it. Kinda bleak- again, I tend to view nonfiction war novels by former service members as half fiction, half real and inspired by their experiences which softens me to certain things I’d usually not like in other genres. I dont like ranking things numerically so i will describe this as chain restaurant burgers, its not brilliant stuff but for a weekday trip out itll do. I did like it, but i dont think other people would.

The Road - i like McCarthy usually (even if i gave up on Child of God) and i love his style but again. What? I adored the writing style; the jumpiness of it, the craftsmanship of it. Something about it just felt off to me

Of Love and Other Demons - when i understand what this book was about I’ll let you know. I like Marquez so I’m bias buttt this was fucking unhinged, like straight off the bat. setting was fantastic. no fucking clue about the rest.

Up next: 100 Years of Solitude (Marquez) The Antipeople (Tansi), Dreambaby (McAllister), and please feel free to suggest any novels that made you go ‘what the fuck?’ (in a good way!!!)

[rockislandadultreads]

Disability Pride Month: More Nonfiction Recommendations

Sitting Pretty by Rebekah Taussig

A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most.

Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.

Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life.

Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.

The Pretty One by Keah Brown

From the disability rights advocate and creator of the #DisabledAndCute viral campaign, a thoughtful, inspiring, and charming collection of essays exploring what it means to be black and disabled in a mostly able-bodied white America.

Keah Brown loves herself, but that hadn’t always been the case. Born with cerebral palsy, her greatest desire used to be normalcy and refuge from the steady stream of self-hate society strengthened inside her. But after years of introspection and reaching out to others in her community, she has reclaimed herself and changed her perspective.

In The Pretty One, Brown gives a contemporary and relatable voice to the disabled—so often portrayed as mute, weak, or isolated. With clear, fresh, and light-hearted prose, these essays explore everything from her relationship with her able-bodied identical twin (called “the pretty one” by friends) to navigating romance; her deep affinity for all things pop culture—and her disappointment with the media’s distorted view of disability; and her declaration of self-love with the viral hashtag #DisabledAndCute.

Helen Keller by Meredith Eliassen 

This book provides new and exciting interpretations of Helen Keller's unparalleled life as "the most famous American woman in the world" during her time, celebrating the 141st anniversary of her birth.

Helen Keller: A Life in American History explores Keller's life, career as a lobbyist, and experiences as a deaf-blind woman within the context of her relationship with teacher-guardian-promoter Anne Sullivan Macy and overarching social history. The book tells the dual story of a pair struggling with respective disabilities and financial hardship and the oppressive societal expectations set for women during Keller's lifetime. This narrative is perhaps the most comprehensive study of Helen Keller's role in the development of support services specifically related to the deaf-blind, as delineated as different from the blind.

Readers will learn about Keller's challenges and choices as well as how her public image often eclipsed her personal desires to live independently. Keller's deaf-blindness and hard-earned but limited speech did not define her as a human being as she explored the world of ideas and wove those ideas into her writing, lobbying for funds for the American Federation for the Blind and working with disabled activists and supporters to bring about practical help during times of tremendous societal change.

The Underdogs by Melissa Fay Greene

The Underdogs tells the story of Karen Shirk, felled at age twenty-four by a neuromuscular disease and facing life as a ventilator-dependent, immobile patient, who was turned down by every service dog agency in the country because she was “too disabled.” Her nurse encouraged her to tone down the suicidal thoughts, find a puppy, and raise her own service dog. Karen did this, and Ben, a German shepherd, dragged her back into life. “How many people are stranded like I was,” she wondered, “who would lead productive lives if only they had a dog?”

A thousand state-of-the-art dogs later, Karen Shirk’s service dog academy, 4 Paws for Ability, is restoring broken children and their families to life. Long shunned by scientists as a man made, synthetic species, and oft- referred to as “Man’s Best Friend” almost patronizingly, dogs are finally paid respectful attention by a new generation of neuroscientists and animal behaviorists. Melissa Fay Greene weaves the latest scientific discoveries about our co-evolution with dogs with Karen’s story and a few exquisitely rendered stories of suffering children and their heartbroken families. Written with characteristic insight, humanity, humor, and irrepressible joy, what could have been merely touching is a penetrating, compassionate exploration of larger questions: about our attachment to dogs, what constitutes a productive life, and what can be accomplished with unconditional love.

[the-rockstar-lestat]

Fuck yeah Vladdy is back?? We've missed you

💕💝

Strength, The Star

& of course:

Forrest

Vladdys never gone, just an attention whore who needs constant attention or he forgets that things exist.

(I forgot a whole fledgling, people. You know who I am, and you love me. )

And, to start out, for those of you who don't feel like scrolling back, anon says they follow me because I'm the stupidest motherfucker alive and they love me.

I'd LIKE to fight the charges, but I think 13-or-so books that I voluntarily wrote of my own free will would be enough evidence against me, so I'll just plead guilty. As long as you love me. (Isn't that a song? From the 90s? Who the hell sang that? One of those addictive boy bands? I could never tell them apart, then or now.)

Anyway! Answers! Yes!

What is your dream occupation?

I want to be a movie star. Not an actor, a MOVIE STAR. I'm not the connoisseur of film Armand is, I just like MOVIES. I want to laugh and weep and scream and play all sorts of different characters, and show up at red carpets in fabulous clothes, and give interviews about my latest roles, and set fashion trends, and have everything I say taken out of context and....

Hang on. Maybe I wouldn't be a great movie star. First of all, I don't think the boulevard du temple acting style would suit a close up lens. Second of all, my mouth would get me cancelled within the week, if not my ....spotted past. Can I be everyone's problematic fave?

Have you ever seen a psychic?

If you don't mind I'll answer that in its own post, because that's a BIT of a story and my long-winded prose style is already threatening to make this a novella.

What's the best present you've ever received?

....you're hoping for something sentimental, romantic, probably given to me by Louis, aren't you?

I have a vinyl copy of Ziggy Stardust signed by David Bowie. It was actually an I'm -sorry-for-being-a-two-faced-asshole-trying-to-rule-the-vampire-court-behind-your-back present from my belovedprime minister, Marius. I don't know where he got it. I don't know how much it cost him. I don't know who he killed for it. What I do know is I HAVE it. And I LOVE it.

What fictional duo do you and your partner act like?

Louis and I have two modes. Will and Hannibal (partners in crime, corrupter and corrupted, drawn to each other in spite of it all, yet ultimately not healthy for each other, full of cryptic talks, sexual tension and dark secrets.) or Eleanor and Chidi from The Good Place. (One of us is Too Much and The Worst, yet trying to be a good person, and the other is so anxious. All the time. About everything. And so frightened they're NOT a good person they freeze up. And yet we love each other and ultimately help each other heal.)

We're thankfully a lot more in Eleanor and Chidi mode.

[gravekeeps]

closed for my peanut butter pie @hemat0lasluts .

it’s a busy saturday night, and the open window lets the various little sounds filter in from the street down below - the laughter of a group passing by, a car horn honking, a dog barking. forrest feels something in the air though, a sense of anticipation that he cannot quite see the reason for yet. it keeps his guard up, his eyes darting around this place he sometimes called home.

there was no home, though. not in the traditional sense anyway. in his line of work it was expected he maintain complete availability, ready to pick up and go anywhere at a moment’s notice. It had happened to him already in his life more times than he could count, with the first time being the most memorable - a tender age where he’d seen the realities of what the consequences of crossing his father were like.

he has only about a half a second to react to the sound of his front door unlocking, the click shooting adrenaline through him as he reached nimbly for the weapon he always kept strapped to his side. his expectations are shattered upon her reveal, his brows knitting together as he holds the gun idly between them and tried to process the sight.

“ who are you ? ” he barks, his tone clear that he demanded an answer. fast.

[arablit]

Translated Work By Iman Mersal, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi Make ALTA Longlists

SEPTEMBER 5, 2024 — A work translated from Arabic made both of the twelve-book longlists announced today by the American Literary Translators Association for the 2024 National Translation Awards: in prose and poetry. The book that made the prose longlist — which was judged by Philip Boehm, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Will Forrester, Joon-Li Kim, and poupeh missaghi — was Iman Mersal’s Traces of…

[mydearestdarlingdead]

If anyone needs a writing exercise, I'd just like to suggest writing prose for your favourite movie scenes.

Jack and Rose on the deck of the Titanic or Forrest on his bench, if you like it; write it.

[azaleaforrest]

Imbued - A Forrest Review

IMBUED is #1 in a dark fantasy duology full of intrigue, mystery, beautiful prose, and mental anguish. Read my review below!

I’ve read Helyna Clove’s first book, Skylark in the Fog, and loved it. A science fiction/space opera, it’s quite different from Imbued. Clove’s range from that book to Imbued is frankly impressive, and I can’t wait to read more by this author. About Helyna Clove:Helyna L. Clove (she/they) is a science-fiction/fantasy novelist, and a lover of all types of storytelling, hot comfort drinks, and a…

[chocsbookblog]

Book Review: The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl

Title: The Very Long, Very Strange Life of Isaac Dahl

Author: Bart Yates

Narrator: Paul Bellantoni

Rating: 5/5

Thanks to NetGalley and RB Media for allowing me a copy of this audio book in return for an honest review.

This wonderful story follows the life of Isaac Dahl, told over twelve chapters, with each chapter being one day in his 96 year life. Starting in 1926 through to 2014 we glimpse the life of Isaac, his twin sister Aggie, and their friend Bo. Through many ups and downs, including both local and global events the trio stick together. This is a journey of love, family, hope and resilience. 

Paul Bellantoni narrates this touching account in a voice so similar to Tom Hanks that it had me thinking of Forrest Gump. He did a beautiful job of bringing the characters to life including the awkward squeak of a teenage boy’s breaking voice that had me cringing in shame for the kid.

Final thoughts: This really was a stunning tale, the characters were realistic to the point that I miss them now it’s over. The prose was engaging, pulling me down into the plot which was at times hilarious and at others devastating.  

Who would enjoy this book: Those who like fictional life stories, modern history and family drama.