#write a book please

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[domesticandlovingmonsters]

"MC was stolen away by the monster because it wanted to breed them"

"MC had was forced onto an arranged marriage with an evil overlord"

"MC was made to-"

Blah blah, give me an MC that leaps at the opportunity to be with the monster/overlord/whatever morally grey character!!

An Orc threatens their village if the MC doesn't join their clan because they want them all to themselves? Hell yes! MC is already packing their belongings and leaping into the tree trunks that are arms.

Overlord/lady apologises to MC that they were saddled with this horrible marriage? What do you MEAN? You're the best damn spouse they could ask for! Moonlit walks through a Gothic castle and blooming gardens? A library? Minions?! Who on earth would pass this up?

A monster offers trinkets to MC as courting gifts, hoping they won't be terrified by their grotesque figure. MC is making little gifts back and keeps the window open to their bedroom on cold nights so the monster comes in for warm cuddles.

Give me an MC that is ecstatic to be chosen by the thing everyone is terrified of! I want a love story without the "but they're evil/a monster" bullshit!

[beaft]

anyway i am by no means positioning myself as an authority on the matter of Literature but here is a list of my favourite queer books and you can judge me for them, or not, as you choose:

orlando by virginia woolf

giovanni's room by james baldwin *

go tell it on the mountain by james baldwin

rebecca by daphne du maurier

the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson *

hangsaman by shirley jackson

your silence will not protect you by audre lorde

maurice by e. m. forster

the colour purple by alice walker

the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde

stone butch blues by leslie feinberg

the left hand of darkness by ursula k leguin *

fingersmith by sarah waters

the argonauts by maggie nelson

monstrous regiment by terry pratchett

fun home by alison bechdel

our wives under the sea by julia armfield

the wasp factory by iain banks

tell me i'm worthless by alison rumfitt

something that may shock and discredit you by daniel lavery *

the buddha of suburbia by hanif kureishi

everything under by daisy johnson

crush by richard siken *

autobiography of red by anne carson *

in the dream house by carmen maria machado *

skin shows by jack halberstam

asterisks are for all time faves!

[beetleandfox]

I love how unsanitized The Terror feels. Like there’s grime everywhere. You can tell those men smell bad. When they do surgery you can hear the bone being cut, when they get sick they look genuinely ill. The main character’s actor even has pockmarks, he LOOKS like he could be from the 1800s! And idk, I think it’s cool that we’re so aware of the characters’ carnal desires. They’re hungry, thirsty, freezing, etc, and it is so obvious that they have a body with needs!!

I think this also accounts for how horny the show feels, even though everyone is bundled up 90% of the time and there are no real romantic subplots. Besides the fact that it’s a very carnal show, it just has the intimacy and grime of true horniness. Is this thing on

[lazylittledragon]

ok someone please correct me if i'm wrong but am i weird for thinking those 'audiobooks don't count as reading' posts are ableist as fuck????

[disgracefulthings]

PIDW AU where after OG Shang Qinghua betrays Mobei-Jun, he falls into a coma before Mobei-Jun finds out (plan backfiring, random demon attack, reason doesn't matter).

When Mobei-Jun does find out, instead of killing him immediately, he plans to allow Shang Qinghua to wake up from his coma and face the consequences of his actions while consious

But when Shang Qinghua wakes up, he has amnesia and doesn't remember anything. Not only that, his whole personality changed! He's a lot more skittish and cowardly, and more importantly, clearly attracted to Mobei-Jun when previously he wasn't

Luo Binghe keeps asking Mobei-Jun when he's going to kill the traitorous rat, but Mobei-Jun keeps making excuses and claiming he's trying to get Shang Qinghua to remember his crimes first

But Mobei-Jun is actually doing everything he can to make sure Shang Qinghua doesn't remember anything. He's much cuter this way, plus he's much more useful in logistics than he was previously. And he is surprisingly competent at sniffing out traitors

What Mobei-Jun doesn't know is that Shang Qinghua is a transmigrator who really did have amnesia, but slowly remembered who he was and what story he's in, and is doing his best to be useful for Mobei-Jun so he doesn't die (while unaware that OG Shang Qinghua had already betrayed the demon).

[pomegranateteeth]

my fascination with the character has gone from blind lust to needing to dissect his psyche like a science experiment

[feelo-fick]

it can't be too hard right?

it's easy not to think about things, he tells me i don't think all the time! wait...

—

a scene from a fic that i have no clue if ill finish, let alone post, but look i made fanart of my own thing that doesnt even exist :D

[grand-line-shenanigans]

For those of us who cannot comprehend big numbers (me) I have done the math. FOUR FUCKING YEARS. SECUNIT WHAT THE FUCK.

[princessofghosts-posts]

I've been thinking about Nico's sword lately and honestly? That weapon alone is extremely OP,even more than whatever other weapon we had in the books (that don't include magical artifacts,because those are part af a different category).

Riptide is made of celestial bronze,so it can harm demigods and monsters,and has a special feature of always returning with Percy no matter what because it's enchanted.

IVLIVS could always be with Jason because it was a golden coin that turned into a javelin,but it got destroyed pretty fast in the narrative so we don't know if it had some other frature. It was also made of imperial gold so again,could slay monsters and immortals.

Katoptris's original use wasn't for battle,since Helen used it as a mirror,but with Piper it mainly focus on its special feature: visions. It was quite useful for them but Piper hated it so we never got to know much about the dagger.

Backbiter is a modified version of Kronos's scythe (sick enough with just this,since Luke can open portals and travelable rips through space and time),but it's made of tempered steel and celestial bronze so it can kill mortals,demigods and monsters and sever their souls.

All of those swords have different feature that distinguish them from normal ones,but they are still made of typical materials for demigods: imperial gold and celestial bronze,while stygian iron is only used for one sword in the books. Luke's sword,in this list,is the only one that is similar to Nico's in term of powerfulness,but it's still quite different.

Stygian iron is a magical metal capable of absorbing or destroying the essence of: monsters,Gods,Titans,demigods and Giants. And,unlike imperial gold and celestial bronze,it can harm mortals,monsters and immortals alike,and prevent the souls of monsters from returning to Tartarus,and traps those of the people it touches.

Technically stygian iron is the strongest,of all the metals,in the books. And the only sword made of this material is Nico's. Only the children of the Underworld can touch the material,but the sword itself can only be touched by Nico,otherwise everyone else souls get trapped and things can get ugly.

Like,not even Percy or Luke had this much power in their weapons: Riptide is a "normal" sword,for how much "normal" its user is,and Backbiter had so much power because it got modified to be similar to Kronos's weapon,but originally it was just made of different metals. But Nico? Nico got a weapon of mass destruction and extermination of humanity in his hand every day. And we never talk about how much damage it can cause,and how much OP it is compared to the other swords.

It doesn't even have a name like the others,but people already know to not fuck with a black sword laying around,becuse they know it's Nico's. Because he is the only one to have,use and held that sword. That's just how iconic it is and how unique it is to everyone. And just like Riptide and IVLIVS (before it got destroyed),his sword is always with him since he can summon it from the shadows and the darkness.

That weapon is OP,literally the strongest of the whole main timeline (we are talking about more than almost 20 books) and we never gave it much more than a look.

This is just another moment of Rick "I don't want someone to overshadow Percy but I already added this....I'll just made sure to not use that too much so people will not give it much attention" regarding Nico.

I'll probably do a list for how many times it happens.

[egophiliac]

so on the subject of the "Crowley is secretly Revaan/Laverne/Levin/please Twst give us his name" theory, I think my feelings are best summed up as "I don't really buy it, but it's funny". like, in all seriousness, I'm not opposed to it; I have enjoyed the writing in Twst so far and I'm willing to trust that whatever happens will, you know, make sense and not be terrible. but I'm just not really convinced by the current evidence! maybe that'll change once we learn more, we'll see!

with that said, may I propose a few alternate theories about the possible Crowley/Revaan connection:

[duckprintspress]

Given how common it is for book posts that say "just give me the book blurb! stop with all the other things!" to get tens of thousands of notes, I feel the need to say, as a tiny micro-publisher: if only sharing the book blurb sold books, trust me, we wouldn't be wasting our time with all the other shenanigans.

But just sharing the blurb doesn't work. Most people scroll right by.

And so we try every single method we can think of, including sharing the blurb among them, to try to get whatever eyes we can on the book.

Of course the description of the story is the best way to sell the book and get people interested, but it only works if y'all actually read it. And getting most people to the point where they'll read anything that isn't already immediately and actively part of their existing interests is fucking hard, so we use splashy graphics and short hand to try to hook people, and then hope that when they read the blurb, that hook will go from "oh, that's worth a glance" to "oh, that's worth a buy."

Also: just because the exact post you saw promoting a book didn't include the blurb doesn't mean other posts about the book don't!

Sorry. I just have seen so much of that recently (and not just because of that poll about "what convinces you to buy," I actually found that whole poll extremely interesting and informative) that I'm kinda losing patience with it.

Just posting the blurb doesn't work.

Signed, someone who sells books for a living, or at least tries to.

[alizalayne]

it's so amusing that when you're an author who is like any minority, you have this caveat where if your book gets banned, you kinda have to mentally acknowledge whether it was banned by Bruce, the one really bigoted guy who wastes everyone's time in florida. idk how bruce is doing. you don't need to learn who he is really which is why im not using his surname. but if you have a book out commercially, bruce has probably written "damaged souls" on a form about you. so there's a street cred element to all this like did people really have a vendetta against your work...? or was it just bruce again

[katblaze]

my contribution to the gravity falls revival

[raining-anonymously]

why did he handwrite this

[mybruisedankleneedsakiss]

about failure and success and the monstrous vacuum in between

Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs // Whisper of the Heart 1995, dir. Yoshifumi Kondō // please, please, please let me get what I want by The Smiths // White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky // Whiplash 2014 dir. Damien Chazelle // Mieko Kawakami, All the lovers in the Nights // Frances Ha 2012 dir. Noah Baumbach // Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea // Steve Jobs 2015 dir. Danny Boyle // Shoko's Smile by Choi Eun-young // Shoko's Smile by Choi Eun-young // Shiva Baby 2020 dir. Emma Seligman // Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke // Evening Wind, Edward Hopper // Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother// Dead Poets Society (1989) dir. Peter Weir // Educated, Tara Westover