aprocyonwrites

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living islands

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“All that talk about the power of friendship,” the antagonist murmured, as they circled the protagonist. “And it never even occurred to you that perhaps your enemies might have friends too, did it? How arrogant a thing, you are…”

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A faerie introduces himself. Then, holding out a hand, asks, “And your name, please?”

And, like a fool, you give it to him.

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Tired: Plant based characters and creatures who refuses to eat meat cause they are “one with nature” and as a result are exclusively vegetarian

Wired: Plant based characters who are so one with plants they refuse to eat them and exclusively eat animal flesh as a result

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The 100 Funniest Words in the English Language

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Book titles rewritten to get more clicks, Upworthy style

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The Black Sheep Book Review: Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

Publisher: Penguin Group

Year Published: 2011

Number of Pages:349

Genre: Fiction

Target Audience: Young Adult ages 12-16

      Sunny Nwazua is albino, but that part was obvious. Her bleach-blonde hair, pale skin, and bright hazel eyes attracted plenty of stares and unwanted attention. As if this weren’t uncomfortable enough, Sunny soon finds out that she’s a witch! Now she and her new friends Orlu, ChiChi, and Sasha, must use their magic to save their home from Black Hat Otokoto, a murderer intent on bringing about the destruction of the world.

       Dear readers, please excuse me while I sing “Akata Witch’s” praises from the top of my growing mountain of books.

       As you all should know by now, I absolutely love fantasy novels - I’ve been reading them ever since I was a little girl. I always dreamed of being a witch, of casting amazing spells, of one day attending Hogwarts and having the sorting hat put me in Ravenclaw where I belonged. But the more fantasy books I read, the less I saw fantasy stories of black girls like me; and to be honest, this hurt me so much. There were hardly any books with black (or African) characters who had magical powers, who had enchanting worlds all their own, whose magic wasn’t seen as “bad” or “backward” or “evil.” I internalized the lack of representation and thought that magic simply wasn’t meant for characters who looked like me. This is why I needed a book like “Akata Witch,” and why stories like these are so necessary.

Keep reading

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okay so fantasy autistics:

Autistic fae with hyperempathy who are constantly in trouble for taking pity on the humans who stumbled into their realm

Autistic dragons who, instead of hoarding gold, hoard something associated with their special interest, like fossils

Autistic waterbenders who Hate the feeling of being wet so they ever so subtly bend rain to go around them

Autistic wizards who won’t stop stimming by casting spells and looking at the glowing lights they cause

Autistic Chosen Ones who figure out that they’re the chosen one because their special interest happens to be the prophecy

Autistic sirens who are nonverbal and create a unique instrument to channel their magic instead

Autistic seers who are widely known as the most trustworthy oracles because they don’t talk in metaphores

Fantasy autistics adapting to their environment and powers and utilizing them in their daily lives just like real autistics do

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Fake dating Taakitz: Kravitz's weird pushy mom, aka the Goddess of Death, keeps trying to set him up with people, despite having only the loosest of grasps on the concept of "dating," "attractive" or "romance." Clearly a fictional boyfriend is the solution. Lup, who Kravitz knows solely as "keeps getting her boyfriend off of minor necromancy charges by beating me at poker" may have a solution in the form of her chronically single brother. It's a match made in Something.

i can’t believe lup sold her brother to death.

“I’m sorry, you did what?”

“Calm down, babe,” Lup says, as if she hadn’t just admitted to selling him to the literal Grim Reaper.

“I am not going on a date with Death.” Now that he says it out loud, it does sound goth as fuck, but Taako is also not for sale, thank you very much. “What the fuck, Lulu?”

Lup shrugs and continues to eat the chocolate chip cookie she absolutely does not deserve anymore. Taako reaches out and pulls the plate of cookies over to his side of the table, glaring at her.

“You know how Barry’s dissertation research has him looking at correlations between cult rituals and mainstream necromantic spells?” Lup asks, like Taako hasn’t watched Barold scare away strangers literally everywhere they take him for the past five years. “Well, there’s sort of been… you know, a problem when he starts testing those correlations because he’s maybe breaking the laws of life and death occasionally? Only minor infractions.”

Taako glances at Barry, also present, looking sheepish beside his sister. “What the fuck, Barold?”

“Science is the art of testing your hypothesis and making sure you get repeatable results,” Barry says. “It’s not like I mean to do it. It’s just—you know, you never really know with these old rituals, whether they’ll work or not, and it’s not like someone pops up right away to tell you you broke the rules. It takes them a while to get to you, and by then you’ve done a few more and…” Barry trails off and shrugs.

“Right,” Lup agrees. “So Barry does his experiments and everything seems fine, and then Kravitz shows up and starts talking about how he’s broken the rules of life and death and—”

Taako holds up a hand, stopping her. “Kravitz?”

“Oh, right. That’s his name,” Lup says.

“The Grim Reaper’s name… is Kravitz.” Taako glances at Barry, for confirmation of the fact that Lup and the Grim Reaper are on a first name basis, and Barry just nods like this is all perfectly reasonable. “Okay. Kravitz. Sure. Go on.”

Lup rolls her eyes. “So Kravitz shows up and gives his speech, and then we play a couple rounds of poker for Barry’s soul. He’s really bad at cards and, you know, I cheat. So last time we were playing I was asking him how the Raven Queen was doing—”

“You fucking what?” Taako sputters.

“Can I finish?” Lup gives him a dirty look. “She’s like his mom. It’s fine. You can ask people how their parents are doing, Taako. So I asked him how she was doing and how death was treating him. You know, the usual, and he said she’s been trying to set him up with a bunch of emissaries for other gods and it’s not going well, so he told her he’d been seeing someone and she wouldn’t know them because they were mortal, but now she wants to meet him except this fictional mortal boyfriend is fictional. And all I had in my hand was a pair of threes.”

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Do you consider yourself a planner or a pantser when it comes to writing?

I write out a scene-by-scene outline, then kind of write in circles- Start at the beginning, writing the scenes at the end that I just set up, going back again to the beginning-middle to connect it a bit, work on another plot line in that fornt-back-front-back-always-towards-the-middle fashion, go back an edit a scene so it flows better, delete that bit entirely, and so on.

I’ve got a general shape I want it to be in the end, and some guidelines but I don’t work in order and I don’t know what’s actually going to be in there until I;m done.

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it is pretty hard to find solid statistics on wolf attacks, but as far as i can tell, wolves in north america kill way way way less than one person a year, which means that forces more deadly to us than wolves include: dogs, ice fishing, and getting crushed by a falling flat screen tv.

…further complications to trying to write non-ridiculous angst into a werewolf story

“you don’t understand…i’ve done things under the full moon that i can never take back…one time i ate a squirrel”

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From  How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely

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Everfair (2016)   //   Tor Books

“Everfair is a wonderful Neo-Victorian alternate history novel that explores the question of what might have come of Belgium’s disastrous colonization of the Congo if the native populations had learned about steam technology a bit earlier. Fabian Socialists from Great Britian join forces with African-American missionaries to purchase land from the Belgian Congo’s “owner,” King Leopold II. This land, named Everfair, is set aside as a safe haven, an imaginary Utopia for native populations of the Congo as well as escaped slaves returning from America and other places where African natives were being mistreated.

Nisi Shawl’s speculative masterpiece manages to turn one of the worst human rights disasters on record into a marvelous and exciting exploration of the possibilities inherent in a turn of history. Everfair is told from a multiplicity of voices: Africans, Europeans, East Asians, and African Americans in complex relationships with one another, in a compelling range of voices that have historically been silenced. Everfair is not only a beautiful book but an educational and inspiring one that will give the reader new insight into an often ignored period of history.”

by Nisi Shawl

Get it  now here

Nisi Shawl’s story “Cruel Sistah” was included in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #19. Her work has also appeared in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy and both Dark Matter anthologies. Recently she perpetrated “The Snooted One: The Historicity of Origin” at the Farrago’s Wainscot website. With Cynthia Ward, she co-authored “Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction” (Aqueduct Press).

A board member of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, one of the Carl Brandon Society’s founders, and a guest speaker at Stanford University and Smith College, Nisi likes to relax by pretending she lives in other people’s houses.

[Follow SuperheroesInColor faceb / instag / twitter / tumblr / pinterest] 

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Four roommates are extraterrestrials who have taken human form in the hopes of learning about Earth’s culture. Unfortunately, each alien is from a different planet and believes the other three are normal humans.

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idk I just love how we Young People Today use ~improper~ punctuation/grammar in actually really defined ways to express tone without having to explicitly state tone like that’s just really fucking cool, like

no    =    “No,” she said. 

no.    =    "No,” she said sharply.

No    =    “No,” she stated firmly.

No.    =    “No,” she snapped.

NO    =    “No!” she shouted.

noooooo    =    “No,” she moaned.

no~    =    “No,” she said with a drawn-out sing-song.

~no~    =    “No,” she drawled sarcastically.

NOOOOO    =    “No!” she screamed dramatically.

no?!    =    “No,” she said incredulously.

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tumblr: on languages

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Weird pornographic fiction online is amazing.

I mean, sure, you can find a lot of sexist, creepy, racist, ableist, etc stuff out there, but that’s true of any genre. They’re products of our culture. What I love about online porn fics is the mind boggling diversity of human desires when they’re seperated from any need for realism or consequences.

That teenager writing bad comic book porn without lube? Is exploring their sexuality without anyone looking over their shoulder for the first time and that’s awesome. That guy that writes fox porn, the musical? inspired. That housewife in her mid-40s that wrote 50 different very specific fics about having a sexual experience with a single sentient tentacle in a public toilet? I love her and I hope she has an epic time by herself with her fantasies.

Like, humans have the ability to find pleasure in ANYTHING and when they do, their impulse is often to share it, to put it online for free so maybe someone else can find pleasure in it too. That’s so beautiful.

And community produced porn? even more amazing! That group of fandom shippers that goes deeper and deeper into a collective head canon where everyone in their favourite show is part of an underground watersports sex cult? They’re experimenting in doing collective creative work that is so rare in a capitalist society that views art as the product of a single genius. Fandom communities, when they function well and aren’t haunted by antis and shipping wars, lack hierarchy or profit incentive and form huge anarchistic melting pots of collaborative creativity where everything is given and received for free.

Just wow.