beagleinthevoid

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my best friend linen my brother in arms cotton my partner wool my beautiful sister silk

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I'm like super normal and not unhinged in the slightest (I spent 3 days formatting, printing, and binding a niche internet story about sci fi football into a 280 page physical book)

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words cannot describe how much I love this image

I had an itch to draw my clown girls again~

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mary oliver already said everything

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oh look, a new reading list!

Black Horror Writers

Feeling a sudden desire, for whatever reason, to add some diversity to your bookshelf? Want to put a few bucks in the pockets of authors of color? Here’s a sampler platter to get you started. 

Tananarive Due A film historian and a hot name in horror fiction, Due is an outspoken academic and prolific author. Start with The Good House, a 2003 Gothic, if you’re a fan of haunted house stories.

Wrath James White A former athlete, White is a hugely prolific author of hardcore horror. You can start with The Resurrectionist, but honestly, with more than 35 books to choose from, you’ve got plenty of options.

Victor LaValle LaValle has only written four novels so far, but they’re well-regarded and rich narratives. The Changeling is the usual recommendation for a starting place.

Brandon Massey Southern Gothic themes woven through horror, suspense and urban themes - that’s Massey’s brand in a nutshell. He’s plenty prolific, so you’ve got a bunch to choose from. Maybe start with this year’s new release, The Quiet Ones.

Chesya Burke A prolific short story writer, Burke writes speculative fiction and comic books. If you’d like a collection of stories all in one place, try out Let’s Play White. If you’d rather do a novel, read The Strange Crimes of Little Africa.

Jemiah Jefferson Do you like pulpy erotic vampire horror? You don’t have to answer that. Just buy Jefferson’s books if you do. There’s a series, so you’ll want to start at the beginning with Voice of the Blood.

Michael Boatman An actor and screenwriter, Boatman is also a novelist. He writes splatterpunk that Joe Lansdale has praised, which is as fine an accolade as they come. The Revenant Road was his first novel. He also shows up in a ton of anthologies, so keep an eye out.

Helen Oyeyemi Oyeyemi is a rising star, Shirley Jackson Award finalist, scholar, a world traveler, among other things. Her most recent book, Gingerbread, came out in 2019. I think it would not be out of line to compare her to Angela Carter.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin A debut novelist, Ruffin’s work launched with a bang in February. His book We Cast a Shadow was long-listed for a stack of prizes, and as a scathing cultural sci-fi horror, it fits right in with the work of folks like Jordan Peele.

Nnedi Okorafor A Nigerian-American writer, Okorafor writes for both children and adults, and her stories have earned a whole stack of awards. She is, for the record, also disabled. She’s got a whole stack of YA and adult books to choose from, as well as comic books. Binti and its sequel are as good a place as any to start, though.

Jewelle Gomez Philanthropist, playwright, poet, author – Gomez dabbles in a lot of things, and she’s an outspoken voice for LGBTQ women of color. Check out The Gilda Stories if you’ve always wanted to read about a black lesbian vampire (and, let’s be honest, who hasn’t?)

PS: When you order, don’t waste your money on Amazon. Instead, use a service like https://bookshop.org/ that distributes your hard-earned cash to independent booksellers. Keep money in your community. 

PPS: I love Toni Morrison and Octavia Butler and also left them off the list because they’re well-known already and because I think it’s really important right now to support living artists, but you should check out their work too. 

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ooh, I’m saving this one for later

the way 'nice dichotomy idiot what lies outside of it' has saved me so many hours of being insane with my thought patterns

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"came back wrong" this "lived wrong" that, what about dying wrong. my death will forever cling to you, leaving behind a slimy trail and a metallic taste in your mouth. my soul will forever drag you down like the heavy corpse of a long-dead god, who somehow still grants wishes. you can't tell which one of us is the one not letting go. you know not even your own death will end this.

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100-Dollar Lotion, acrylic on masonite board

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Making a shitty one-page RPG called Oh Shit It’s the Killer. The premise is simple: you’re a high schooler spending the weekend in the woods with your besties. The Killer is there also. He is trying to the Kill you

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love is real and it’s saturday morning sunlight spilling onto the bathroom tiles as the faucet drips and ur rubbing lotion into ur face and it’s spring and the love of ur life is waiting in the kitchen for u and there’s a peeled clementine on the counter and u haven’t flinched in years

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One of many mornings 🌝

Adam pays a lot of attention to details.

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bold of you to assume it can’t be both

I love folklore so much because depending on the location and era it comes from it's either the most terrifying concept or the dumbest thing you've ever heard

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We need more Miss Marples in the world <3

why aren't there more mysteries that take place in nursing homes & retirement communities. i want to watch a group of deranged retirees-cum-amateur-detectives combine their powers of:

decades of life experience

boredom-fueled busybody shamelessness

access to the most gossipy next-door-neighbors in existence

"I am too old to be arrested and/or give a shit" attitude

and solve crimes. this should be an enormous subgenre.

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Botanical drawings are sometimes favored over more realistic photos or pressed plants because they can depict the “perfect” specimen: a single plant displaying undamaged features at different stages of development.

Source: Project Botany https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-botany/id1460520002?i=1000435916412&l=nb

Botanical illustrations taken from ‘English Flower Garden’ (between 1852 and 1853) by William Thompson.

Natural History Museum Library, London.

https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/pageimage/15895186

Wikimedia.

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You are a modern Oracle, you don’t do toxic fumes or cryptic riddles. You just down seventeen coffees, black out from a caffeine overdose and wake up with a bunch of cringy fanfic about some heroes adventure on your laptop.

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You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Wild Geese - Mary Oliver

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Today’s Mood:

What even are unpaid internships?

Like, if you don’t value labor enough to pay someone to do it, why does it need to be done? And if it is something that *needs* to be done, why don’t you value that enough to pay someone?

I mean, if you don’t want coffee badly enough to pay someone to bring it to you, then accept the fact that you’ll have to get your own coffee? Or organize your own files? Or whatever?

I dunno, call me a bitter idealist, but it seems pretty insulting to me