aplentifullackofwit

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SO THE GIRLS ARE ALL DEAD. SO THE GIRLS ARE ALL MONSTERS. OK. FINE. IF THE GIRL WHO LIKES KISSING GIRLS MUST DIE, THEN FINE. I’LL SHOW YOU A DEAD GIRL: SHE WILL BE DEAD AND MERCILESS. GO AHEAD. BURY HER. THIS TIME SHE WILL RISE. SHE WILL CLAW HER WAY UP. GRAVE-DIRT UNDER HER FINGERNAILS. DRIPPING AND DARK-HAIRED FROM THE WATER. YOU WANTED A DEAD GIRL AND YOU’RE GOING TO GET A DEAD GIRL. YOU WANTED A MONSTER AND YOU’RE GOING TO GET A MONSTER.  IF THERE MUST BE BLOOD THEN THERE WILL BE BLOODSHED, DO YOU HEAR ME?  IF SHE IS A MONSTER FOR LOVING GIRLS THEN SHE IS A MONSTER, THIS TIME. SHE WILL HAUNT THIS HOUSE YOU BUILT. SHE WILL SHAKE THOSE BONES. DON’T YOU KNOW YOU LEFT HER HUNGRY? LISTEN TO ME. IF YOU WANT A HORROR SHOW THEN I WILL GIVE YOU A HORROR SHOW. DON’T KILL ANYTHING YOU AREN’T PREPARED TO MAKE A GHOST OF.

s.s., “bury your gays” (via rabbittmouth)

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Ten questions to ask a friend who just read your novel

Here are ten questions to ask that will not put your friend in a tough spot, but will still give you some useful input on your novel:

1. At what point did you feel like “Ah, now the story has really begun!”  2. What were the points where you found yourself skimming?  3. Which setting in the book was clearest to you as you were reading it? Which do you remember the best?  4. Which character would you most like to meet and get to know?  5. What was the most suspenseful moment in the book?  6. If you had to pick one character to get rid of, who would you axe?  7. Was there a situation in the novel that reminded you of something in your own life?  8. Where did you stop reading, the first time you cracked open the manuscript? (Can show you where your first dull part is, and help you fix your pacing.)  9. What was the last book you read, before this? And what did you think of it? (This can put their comments in context in surprising ways, when you find out what their general interests are. It might surprise you.)  10. Finish this sentence: “I kept reading because…”

Your friend is probably still going to tell you, “It was good!” However, if you can ask any specific questions, and read between the lines, you can still get some helpful information out of even the most well-meaning reader.

Source: Examiner

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There should be just one safe place in the world, I mean this world. People get hurt here. People fall down and stay down and I don’t like the way the song goes.

Richard Siken, from “Road Music” (via theclassicsreader)

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There should be a word for the microscopic spark of hope that you dare not entertain in case the mere act of acknowledging it will cause it to vanish, like trying to look at a photon. You can only sidle up to it, looking past it, walking past it, waiting for it to get big enough to face the world.

Mort, Terry Pratchett (via mouseinmypocket)

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Give me your maelstrom girls. Your women with hurricanes in their hearts and tsunamis in their souls.  Give me girls whose mouths spit poison and never smile on command. Give me the ones that burn too hot and bright, and let them go to war. Let them save their sisters who still wear the flower crowns, and don’t yet have a taste for violence.

black holes are only as strong as their stars burned bright - c.k (via widowbitesandhearingaids)

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Watch: Poet G Yamazawa nails what it’s like to grow up in the U.S. as the child of immigrants.

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@republicofthebees

Bees matter

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Tell the king; the fair wrought house has fallen No shelter has Apollo, nor sacred laurel leaves The fountains are now silent; the voice is stilled. It is finished.

The final recorded words of the last Oracle of Delphi, 395 AD. (via blurrymelancholy)

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Do you ever see people whose faces echo another era? I’ve seen women with the round faces, sparse brows and high foreheads of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Men with dark brows that meet in the middle, olive skin, strong noses and jaws–Byzantine men, ghosts of Constantine, reanimated faces from the Fayum Mummy Portraits. Women with soft figures and the large eyes and prim, petaled mouths of the 19th century. Grizzled men whose brows predicate their gaze, whose wrinkles track into their thick beards and read like topographical maps of hardship and intensity–the wanderer, the poet; Whitman, Tolstoy, Carlyle.  Faces sculpted into the perfect, deified symmetry of the pharaohs–almond eyes, full lips, self-assurance 3,000 years in the making staring at you at a stoplight.   Plump, curved white wrists curled over purse handles in the waiting room and you think Versailles, Madame Pompadour, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great. Wide cheek bones, courage and sorrow in the scrunched face of the old man in line behind you and it’s Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh. Reddened skin, thick forearms, hair and beard and brows burned by the cold into a reddish corn silk and you think Odin, the forge and the hammer and skin stinging from the salt of the ocean. Virginia Woolf’s quiet brand of gaunt frankness surveys you in passing in the parking lot. Queen Victoria’s heavy-lidded stare and beaked nose are firmly, uncannily fixed on a sixth-grade classmate’s face. Renaissance voluptuousness on the boardwalk by the beach. Boticelli’s caramel androgyny in a youth smoking on a bench outside the mall. Jazz age looseness spurs the tripping gait of the man who watches you paint with his hands in his pockets, and he smiles a Sammy Davis Jr. smile and tells you that you look familiar, that he’s sure he’s seen you somewhere before, but he doesn’t know where or when.

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When I was nine, possibly ten, an author came to our school to talk about writing. His name was Hugh Scott, and I doubt he’s known outside of Scotland. And even then I haven’t seen him on many shelves in recent years in Scotland either. But he wrote wonderfully creepy children’s stories, where the supernatural was scary, but it was the mundane that was truly terrifying. At least to little ten year old me. It was Scooby Doo meets Paranormal Activity with a bonny braw Scottish-ness to it that I’d never experienced before.

I remember him as a gangling man with a wiry beard that made him look older than he probably was, and he carried a leather bag filled with paper. He had a pen too that was shaped like a carrot, and he used it to scribble down notes between answering our (frankly disinterested) questions. We had no idea who he was you see, no one had made an effort to introduce us to his books. We were simply told one morning, ‘class 1b, there is an author here to talk to you about writing’, and this you see was our introduction to creative writing. We’d surpassed finger painting and macaroni collages. It was time to attempt Words That Were Untrue.

You could tell from the look on Mrs M’s face she thought it was a waste of time. I remember her sitting off to one side marking papers while this tall man sat down on our ridiculously short chairs, and tried to talk to us about what it meant to tell a story. She wasn’t big on telling stories, Mrs M. She was also one of the teachers who used to take my books away from me because they were “too complicated” for me, despite the fact that I was reading them with both interest and ease. When dad found out he hit the roof. It’s the one and only time he ever showed up to the school when it wasn’t parents night or the school play. After that she just left me alone, but she made it clear to my parents that she resented the fact that a ten year old used words like ‘ubiquitous’ in their essays. Presumably because she had to look it up.

Anyway, Mr Scott, was doing his best to talk to us while Mrs M made scoffing noises from her corner every so often, and you could just tell he was deflating faster than a bouncy castle at a knife sharpening party, so when he asked if any of us had any further questions and no one put their hand up I felt awful. I knew this was not only insulting but also humiliating, even if we were only little children. So I did the only thing I could think of, put my hand up and said “Why do you write?”

I’d always read about characters blinking owlishly, but I’d never actually seen it before. But that’s what he did, peering down at me from behind his wire rim spectacles and dragging tired fingers through his curly beard. I don’t think he expected anyone to ask why he wrote stories. What he wrote about, and where he got his ideas from maybe, and certainly why he wrote about ghosts and other creepy things, but probably not why do you write. And I think he thought perhaps he could have got away with “because it’s fun, and learning is fun, right kids?!”, but part of me will always remember the way the world shifted ever so slightly as it does when something important is about to happen, and this tall streak of a man looked down at me, narrowed his eyes in an assessing manner and said, “Because people told me not to, and words are important.”

I nodded, very seriously in the way children do, and knew this to be a truth. In my limited experience at that point, I knew certain people (with a sidelong glance to Mrs M who was in turn looking at me as though she’d just known it’d be me that type of question) didn’t like fiction. At least certain types of fiction. I knew for instance that Mrs M liked to read Pride and Prejudice on her lunch break but only because it was sensible fiction, about people that could conceivably be real. The idea that one could not relate to a character simply because they had pointy ears or a jet pack had never occurred to me, and the fact that it’s now twenty years later and people are still arguing about the validity of genre fiction is beyond me, but right there in that little moment, I knew something important had just transpired, with my teacher glaring at me, and this man who told stories to live beginning to smile. After that the audience turned into a two person conversation, with gradually more and more of my classmates joining in because suddenly it was fun. Mrs M was pissed and this bedraggled looking man who might have been Santa after some serious dieting, was starting to enjoy himself. As it turned out we had all of his books in our tiny corner library, and in the words of my friend Andrew “hey there’s a giant spider fighting a ghost on this cover! neat!” and the presentation devolved into chaos as we all began reading different books at once and asking questions about each one. “Does she live?”— “What about the talking trees” —“is the ghost evil?” —“can I go to the bathroom, Miss?” —“Wow neat, more spiders!”

After that we were supposed to sit down, quietly (glare glare) and write a short story to show what we had learned from listening to Mr Scott. I wont pretend I wrote anything remotely good, I was ten and all I could come up with was a story about a magic carrot that made you see words in the dark, but Mr Scott seemed to like it. In fact he seemed to like all of them, probably because they were done with such vibrant enthusiasm in defiance of the people who didn’t want us to.

The following year, when I’d moved into Mrs H’s class—the kind of woman that didn’t take away books from children who loved to read and let them write nonsense in the back of their journals provided they got all their work done—a letter arrived to the school, carefully wedged between several copies of a book which was unheard of at the time, by a new author known as J.K. Rowling. Mrs H remarked that it was strange that an author would send copies of books that weren’t even his to a school, but I knew why he’d done it. I knew before Mrs H even read the letter.

Because words are important. Words are magical. They’re powerful. And that power ought to be shared. There’s no petty rivalry between story tellers, although there’s plenty who try to insinuate it. There’s plenty who try to say some words are more valuable than others, that somehow their meaning is more important because of when it was written and by whom. Those are the same people who laud Shakespeare from the heavens but refuse to acknowledge that the quote “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them“ is a dick joke.

And although Mr Scott seems to have faded from public literary consumption, I still think about him. I think about his stories, I think about how he recommended another author and sent copies of her books because he knew our school was a puritan shithole that fought against the Wrong Type of Wordes and would never buy them into the library otherwise. But mostly I think about how he looked at a ten year old like an equal and told her words and important, and people will try to keep you from writing them—so write them anyway.

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Watch: Poet Melissa Newman-Evans confesses number 9 is “the most terrifying thing to think about yourself.”

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Tell me it gets better. Ask me about the dreamer that died. Give me a reason to not get comfortable in this skin. Show me the silver lining, the most attenuated form as it might be in. Remind me about the goodness in people, one that the dreamer could once so promptly and vividly recognize. Remind me. Of the strength she had, that they admired. Make me believe that this too, shall pass. Let me live, leave.

girl-in-blue (via wnq-writers)

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When Your Boyfriend Hits You for the First Time

Do not give him the grace of your open face.

Do not give him your begging body,

your salt and molasses howls.

He will twist you like taffy, convince you that

earthquakes only scare those afraid of change.

Oh girl, remember those nights when you

rode the night through bar after bar,

til you were all glitter and no sober,

til the witches of Salem came down

from their flames in Hell

and fed their ashes into your waiting mouth.

He was never worth it, just like Adam

was never worth God’s condemnation.

Wear that rib yourself.

Spin it into gold like the miller’s daughter.

Wear it like your boyfriend’s loss

when he finally realizes how beautiful you were.

Not with the thunder of his hands

or the rain of his fists.

Just with the son of your brow.

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Aries — there was a war in your childhood home, and you can still remember the fires, how the blood was pretty and sick on the bathroom’s pristine tiles, your mother’s still warm body limp in the tub. breathe in through the mouth: in, out, in. you are not guilty. her life is not on your hands. Taurus — it is okay to love things more than you love people; practical, even. people have left you, people will leave you – things, though, ah! things will not abandon you. buy yourself something nice. it is the least bad out of all your choices. Gemini — you die every night and are reborn at dawn; you are a walking graveyard, an army of yesterdays’ ghosts, and you no longer remember who you were at the beginning. do not weep for the stranger that once inhabited your bones. Cancer — you are in love with the idea of love more than you are in love with your lovers; that is why all your relationships are fleeting, why you are always falling apart. all the same, smile when he proposes. pretend you do not know how this is going to end. Leo — oh, you poor, poor thing. all you have ever wanted was love’s sunlight, but all you ever got were the thunderstorms, the clouds above your head heavy with sorrow, and so you chose to drown out the rain between the thighs of a lover. do not regret it, for they were good nights. Virgo — you cradled your heart all your life with such care, and when the day came for you to hand it to another, it shattered like glass in their grip. they did not mean to hurt you, you know. they just wanted to hold on, afraid it will slip through their fingers like sand. Libra — you are the king of bad choices, from lovers to the fights you pick when you are far from sober; you lost your sanity along the line between what is right and what is not, and you started hungering. i fear the day your hunger will be quenched – only justice will sate you, and that calls for everyone’s dying. Scorpio — you are the one everyone fears: the monster in the closet, the witch at the stake – the devil, falling. all of this is because they cannot understand you. they fear you like they fear death; instinctively. do not mind them, for death is a kind god: the sweetest sleep, the darkness from which life is born. Sagittarius — some days, you think the sea is but a giant mirror, the vanity of coquettish stars and lazy clouds in passing. some days, you think it is the fury of our earth mother, her tears and her sorrow saltwater in the breeze. on all of them, you want to sail its’ lengths; you want to get lost out on the abyss, feel small beneath the sky. Capricorn — you learned early on the art of silent war – the war carried by words, sharper than any other blade. at the same time, you have learned how little you mattered to the world, and so you cast yourself in armor. i just wish you would learn to love yourself, if only a little. your own words have been cutting you all along. Aquarius — there is a sickness in you called longing: you’re wanton, thirsty, hungry, wanting – what, exactly, well, that is part two, and none of us is really sure. you’re standing here, hands reaching for; come inside. i will pour us both some wine, and we can pass the waiting time together. one day, you will know what you are lusting after. Pisces — all you have ever loved seems to be taken from you, until your house is left an empty, cold thing, and your soul has been turned into a ruin. do not despair; get up from the floor, dust your clothes. there are seeds on the upper shelves in the shed. it is a time as good as any to start keeping a garden.

poetry for the signs: the “it is okay” edition, L. Schreiber (via angelicxi)

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this e.e. cummings poem is probably very Deep but honestly at this point it just reads like a shitpost to me