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vampire sucking blood from the inner thigh can be something so erotic and more vampire media needs to get on this train

look at this post with your eyes if you agree

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wow, even this post is now outdated. the passage of time is incredible! <- said with a thousand-yard kubrick stare. but would you look at the time, it's may 17th again, so happy birthday to my oldest long-running WIP! TMR has been on hiatus for.. a while... holy shit is this project ten years old this year... what the fuck... what the fuck... but someday i will come back to it, because it's the story about trans kids and mental illness that i dreamed up when i was a trans kid with mental illness, and it remains very special to me even if it's now a bit undercooked compared to some of my other projects. so. someday. in the meantime, uh, happy birthday to This Thing. absolutely crazy dude i'm old as fuck

[image description: a cropped image of a forest of dark green pine trees, over which white text reads “THE MORTAL REALM, a WIP re-intro of sorts.” image credit to evgeni evgeniev on unsplash.]

BEWARE THE KINGDOM OF THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD.

…aaaaaaand we’re back.

TMR! my beloved! the first WIP i ever posted about on this blog! the one i’ve rather neglected for the past two years! the one that i’m going to fully rewrite this summer! i’ve gotten a decent amount of new followers recently who, i don’t think, know very much about this one, so i thought it was time for a reintro. and what better day than may 17th, this WIP’s very own birthday!

Between the raven and dove kingdoms lie hundreds of miles of thick forest. Many children have wandered in. Only a handful have ever come out. And the forest wants them back.

young adult high fantasy

The One That Would Be Trans Kid Found Family Bonding If The Forest Didn’t Eat People

ft. unkind fae, flower symbolism, complicated family dynamics, and blood magic

starring:

aurum ravenfang, boy king with Trauma TM who discovers he can talk to ghosts

winter auklet, farm girl turned adventurer who discovers her childhood accident had some magical roots [ba-dum-tss]

and viridi doveswing, who came out of the woods with amnesia and a curse that stops him from lying. you know. mostly.

you can find the page here and more links here! but for now, since it’s TMR’s birthday, some fun facts:

- TMR is the oldest active project i have, clocking in at six years old! holy shit.

- when i started working on it, i identified as a cishet girl and all of the characters were white cishet catpeople. now i’m gay and trans and so are they; it’s like the main characters grew up and came out with me :-) they are also not catpeople anymore, though catboy aurum jokes are still encouraged.

- it’s not actually that much transer than my other WIPs, but i still think of it as The Trans Kid One because 1) these characters are so dear to my heart and 2) like i said, they sort of came out with me. shoutout to the character whom i projected all of my own dysphoria upon at thirteen. and then i acknowledged her as nonbinary in-story. and kept calling myself cis. without any second-guessing at all. mamma mia

- because it’s my oldest active WIP, it’s the oldest WIP on this blog, as well! when i first made this blog in 2018 (oh. my god i’m old), i posted exclusively about TMR. while i’ve posted about it less since, my blog is still vaguely themed after it! my mobile header is an image of a forest; my icon is @asimpleram‘s art of viridi’s pet raven, cora; and my blog title, BEWARE, is… well, a reasonable warning about my blog contents, but BEWARE THE KINGDOM OF THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD is an important phrase in TMR!

- my more recent project darkling actually started as an unholy quarantine-brain fusion of king lear and a TMR au! it’s hard to tell from looking at either project now, but they still have some similarities; i like to think of darkling as TMR’s jaded older sibling.

- because my earliest recorded TMR notes are from may 17th, 2015, tmr is a taurus.

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I think that my favourite genre is “what the fuck is wrong with the forest”

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Louise Bourgeois

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“it was just a phase”-ing an evil arc is one of my favorite concepts of being in an immortal friend group. everyone got that one homie who relapses into negative thoughts patterns and tries to create the torment nexus and entrap another civilization within it, it happens.

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you know once you make a supplementary OC for your main OC's backstory you're doomed

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some director's commentary here:

i have spent this semester, my last of undergrad, thinking about how most things the people around me take for granted as natural inherent fact are constructed systems of power

the first guide i ever read to passive/active voice contained a Zombie Trick: you can tell a verb is passive if you can put "by zombies" after it, eg, "he was killed....... BY ZOMBIES." someone in the notes mentioned Laura Da's "Passive Voice" poem, which i had not actually read before this, but which i'm glad to have found

prophylactic usually refers to preventative care. it is here partially because i could not initially remember the word periphrastic (roundabout; using more words than necessary; you learn this one in latin grammar class), and partially because both prophylactic and prolepsis have an element of apprehension/prevention: prolepsis in a sentence happens when you put the result before the cause (“if you X, you’re a dead man”). there’s something there with the way you can use language to preempt people. it gets so much harder to disobey your social context if your language itself has a built-in limit

classes i took this semester included a thesis workshop (i wrote about cleopatra, who never got to tell her story in her own hand, and who has been used handily as a prop for the two thousand years since) and a trans studies class (in which i read about the construction of modern gender in the 1950s and the use of that construction to make children keep suffering without treatment)

the goal was for the poem to start out so euphemistic and clinical that it's hard to parse. the language only drops to colloquial bluntness when the poem puts its poem hand on a hot stove, the thing that cannot be expressed

coming at you live from the notes app is a poem called "my professor highlighted every instance of passive voice in my thirty-thousand-word thesis document"

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vampires as metaphors for temptation/desire is cool and all but what about vampires as a metaphor for cycles of abuse? someone who was abused and exploited a long time ago in the process of becoming a vampire and now is the abuser, someone who turns another into a vampire in desperate desire for companionship and begins to understand why the vampire who turned them did it. a never ending tragic cycle that spans centuries

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if i was stuck in a room witha crocodile id gain its trust and we would escape together

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Whispers in the Wild 🌳꩜ by Antti Laitinen (2019)

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i wish i could remember who made the recommendation to "make a list of all the different ways someone could feel about a topic in your fictional setting and then make each of them a character" because it is a great technique and is also extremely fun

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Guy who is touch starved but emotionally repressed goading you into punching him for completely normal reasons

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commission for @albatris !! i absolutely adored drawing their oc and it came out so well!

comms are still OPEN! if anyone is interested please DM me

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things to ask yourself at the end of each chapter and/or scene:

what do we learn about the characters in this chapter/scene?

how does what we learn tie into the plot?

what sort of feelings does this scene/chapter induce?

what is the point of this scene/chapter? (it doesn’t have to be a big point, but there must be some point)

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