#I'm a poet and I know it

[dragonbornphoenix]

A little birthday present for my lovely and amazing friend Andithiel who also happens to be one of the best HP fandom writers.

Thank you for your friendship and for everything else, Andi! YOU are the true gift! 💖

Cake-a-licious!

Draco watched Harry try to assemble the cake. His right eyebrow had gone to meet his hairline and looked ready to abandon his face and run away. “What, in Merlin’s name, are you doing?” 

“What does it look like I’m doing, smarty pants?”

“Looks like you are murdering an innocent cake right in front of my eyes.”

“Ha ha, you’re such a comedian, Draco! You should do stand-up comedy!” 

“I am standing up, aren’t I? And that poor cake is being tortured within an inch of its life.”

“The cake is fine. It’s you who’s torturing my ears. Go away and let me work in peace.”

“I don’t see any peace here, only savagery and barbarism. Let. Me. Help. You!”

“I was cooking and baking while others chewed your food before they fed it to you; I don’t need any help.”

“And I am a seven-Michelin-starred chef, so whatever point you are trying to make is ridiculous. What you are doing is an affront to the natural order. You should at least have chosen a simpler cake.”

“Andithiel deserves the best birthday cake, and I am going to give it to her!”

“Not from where I’m standing.”

“So go stand somewhere else!”

Draco looked at Harry. He was dishevelled, sweaty, labouring with fogged-up glasses, the tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth, covered in unidentified substances, and bits of cake all over his clothes. The stubborn berk!

But Draco was just as obstinate as Harry. Andithiel did indeed deserve the most wonderful cake, and if he stood by and let Harry commit crimes against baking and cakes everywhere, what she would get would be a Frankencake begging to be put out of its misery. 

He stepped over and, with a light touch, shoved Harry away to take his place in front of the bench. 

“Hey! What are you doing?”

“Staging a coup and taking over. Damage control. Stopping an assassination. Saving us the embarrassment. Pick one. Or pick the bunch; they’re all accurate.”

Harry fumed. “Oh no, you’re not!”

“Oh yes, I am!”

Harry shoved Draco sideways, trying to gain his previous position. Draco held fast and shoved back. 

“I can do it on my own; I don’t need help!”

“That’s right, you need an intervention!”

“I’ll show you an intervention!”

What happened next was sudden and unexpected; while they shoved each other and traded barbs, the cake exploded, covering both of them from head to toe!

“What…” Draco said. 

“How…” Harry said. 

They locked eyes, gaping at the empty space where the cake sat. Shock hit them like a sledgehammer, leaving them speechless. A few seconds later Draco erupted into laughter, throwing his head back, his entire body shaking with amusement.

“It killed itself!” he wheezed. “It couldn’t take it any more!”

Harry joined him, shaking his head. He reached out and scooped a small chunk from Draco’s cheek. He sucked his finger, and an obscene moan came tumbling out. 

Draco took half a step to close the distance. “You have a bit of filling here,” he said before leaning in and kissing Harry on the lips. “Delicious!” he breathed, looking into Harry’s eyes. “The cake is alright too.” 

Harry threw his arms around Draco’s neck and kissed him like his life depended on it. It was filthy, sensual, and glorious. 

“What am I going to do with you?” Draco whispered. 

“Not divorce me, I hope.” Harry replied and leaned his forehead against Draco’s.

“If that was your pathetic attempt at getting rid of me, do I have news for you. You’re stuck with me. For life.”

“In that case, what you are going to do is take me to the shower and help me wash away all the mess. For the next two hours.”

"Including the one we'll make?"

"I said all, didn't I?"

“With pleasure. But first, I’m going to lick every little bit of cake off your skin.”

And so Andithiel’s cake was forgotten in a haze of lust, love, and dirty sweet talk. But she didn’t mind one bit. After all, cakes are temporary, but love lasts forever.

 

[deadpoets]

DEAD POETS SOCIETY (1989) dir. Peter Weir

[stillboredbuttrying]

Unheard - Hozier (2024):

1. I have one life and I'm not gonna waste it living someone else's idea of good :)

2. The grief and sorrow are persistent, but so is healing and rebirth

3. Fuck England and whoever try to suppress our freedom, we will win our freedom back

4. I'm gonna experience everything to its fullest even if it leads to my downfall

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I don't think this means anything, but along with the album cover colours getting darker with each successive variant that others have pointed out, one thing that jumped out at me is how the cover photos are more revealing of her with each one as well.

The first one her face is hidden 1989-style, the second one her face is partially obstructed by her arm and hair, the third one she's facing the camera in side profile (also notably no longer in bed).

It's probably just because all the photos are going to be brilliant because Beth Garrabant is incredible and they're just pretty to look at and they wanted to give contrast to each one, but it does kinda feel like she's stepping out of the metaphorical dark with each version.

Like, she's gone from being curled in bed to contemplating getting up to stepping outside but still covered in (his*?) shirt to...

idk I love cover art can you tell (and I love how Taylor tells stories with hers)

[avalonlights]

For @billyhargrovebingo | C1: "10 Things I Hate About You AU"

[pencap]

By Sylvie (j.p.)

[hum--hallelujah]

actually "tell the boys where to find my body" is like top 3 FOB lyrics that makes me feel like I'm going to throw up

[trickstersaint]

flush // april 13 2023

[whiskeyswifty]

I mentioned before that the ttpd cover being on a bed is yes a bit more risqué (it’s barely that in general but for HER it is) than she’s ever been visually on an album cover. But also that tweet got me thinking about the bed as a location in her recent lyrical history. And while I’m personally not a fan of “everything is connected” swiftieism, I love the evolution of subtext it tells.

How it served as a safe harbor of sorts, with “you had turned my bed into a sacred oasis” and “we rule the kingdom inside my room” and “carve your name into my bedpost” on rep and how it’s depicted as a protected place, made that way by the person she was in the bed with. They turned the bed into an oasis, carving their name into it, staking their claim and altering it with their presence. Fortifying it. Or how sometimes, it was the only place where they could meet and come together, “head on the pillow I can feel you sneaking in” and “back and forth from New York, sneaking in your bed.” How in reality,  maybe the bed (and what can be inferred happens there) was the biggest, if not sole, pillar of their relationship at those points, or for longer perhaps. For better or worse. And then at other points, perhaps in a linear sense later down the line, it’s a place of domestic refuge, with “feels like home, stay in bed all weekend” and “leave the warmest bed I’ve ever known” and also the somewhat more tangental “now I’ve read all the books beside your bed.” The bed is more of a domestic place, where she can settle in and retire to and be at ease. The thrill may be gone, but the bed serves a new purpose that she finds equally as rewarding. It’s a place of vulnerability ultimately, away from prying eyes where things can play out that never see the light of day. Plans for the future like “drew a map on your bedroom ceiling” or heartbreak like “but now my eyes leak acid rain on the pillow where you used to lay your head.” There’s an intimacy to her room and her bed that had heretofore been too sacred to her to share, to let anyone else but them in. But the implication of the cover art, her setting this album visually in that bed, that walled off place, makes it particularly enticing. How she’s perhaps finally letting us in to that sacred place and the highs and lows of what transpired there, however lyrically.

But also with the bed as a locational and emotional focal point for a previous relationship(s?), it lends itself to that popular idiom as well. How looking back, she confronts the fact that everything that has happened since she let them into her bed were still choices she chose to make and she’s now writing this album to come to terms with how it all turned out, regrets and mistakes and would have’s and all. As if, you could say, that having made her bed all those years, she’s now ready to quite literally lie in it. 

[greenerteacups]

Hi! I am an ardent fan of your writing, and I hope to be as sorted and planned as you some day in my own writing journey.

My question is: you have a keen eye when it comes to planning character personality, dynamics, and such. I've also been wading through your ask replies, and your insights into how you write people and how you make them play off of each other is so wonderful to read. If it's not too personal a q, how did you learn how to write like this? Did you go to school for writing, does it come from years of observing people, do you have reading list recs for "how to write real people and real interactions"?

Thanks! This is a really flattering question. I'll try to answer it honestly, because I wish someone had been brutally honest about this with me when I was a young writer.

I didn't go to school for writing. I started doing it when I was about nine years old. It sucked very badly. I kept writing throughout high school, and it still mostly sucked, but some of it was occasionally interesting. ("Interesting" here does not mean "good," by the way.) I took a break in college, and then came back. I've been writing ever since. Sometimes, I feel good about it. A lot of the time, I don't!

I hate giving this advice, because I remember how it feels to get it, and it's the most uninspiring, boring-ass, dog shit advice you can get, but it's also the only advice that is 100% unequivocally true: you have to write, and specifically, you have to write things that suck.

I do not mean that you should make things that suck on purpose. I mean that you have to sit down and try your absolute hardest to make something good. You have to put in the hours, the elbow grease, the blood, sweat, and tears, and then you have to read it over and accept that it just totally sucks. There is no way around this, and you should be wary of people who tell you there is. There is no trick, no rule, no book you can buy or article you can read, that will make your writing not suck. The best someone else can do is tell you what good writing looks like, and chances are, you knew that anyway — after all, you love to read. You wouldn't be trying to do this if you didn't. And anyone who says they can teach you to write so good it doesn't suck at first is either lying to you, or they have forgotten how they learned to write in the first place.

So the trick is to sit there in the miserable doldrums of Suck, write a ton, and learn to like it. Because this is the phase of your path as an artist when you find what it is you love about writing, and it cannot be the chance to make "good writing." This will be the thing that bears you through and compels you to keep going when your writing is shit, i.e., the very thing that makes you a writer in the first place. So find that, and you've got a good start.

Some people know this, but assume that perseverance as a writer is about trying to get to the point where you don't suck anymore. This is not true, and it is an actively dangerous lie to tell young writers. You are not aiming to feel like your writing doesn't suck. You are aiming to write. You are aiming to have written. Everything else is dust and rust. And of course, you'll find things you like about your pieces, you'll find things you're proud of, you'll learn to love the things you've made. But that little itch of self-criticism, in the back of your brain — the one that cringes when you read a clunky line, or thinks of a better character beat right after it's far too late to change — that's never going away. That's the Writer part of you. Read Kafka, read Dickens, read Tolstoy, you will find diary entries where they lament how absolutely fucking atrocious their writing was, and how angry they are that they can't do better. A good writer hates their sentences because they can always imagine better ones. And the ability to imagine a better sentence is what's going to make you pick up the pen again tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Which is what I mean, and probably what all those other annoying, preachy advice-givers mean, when we say: a good writer is just someone who writes every day. It's that easy, and that hard.

[rocksanddeadflowers]

Kvasir messes me up so so so fucking much you guys. Like I understand the vikings had a different approach to death and yada yada so forth whatever arguments you wanna make they're reasonable but still it. I just.

You mean this beloved man, known for his wisdom and poem and song, and who went around helping people with his wisdom and poem and song and was dearly beloved by the gods just. You guys he was straight up murdered and his blood stolen for magic fucking mead. There's no revenge for his murder or anything it's just that Odin saved his mead.

"Folk declares that every skald (poet) has a drop of Kvasir's blood in him. ... because a world without it's poets would be too dreadful a place to image."

Messed up or not, he lives on in poets, storytellers, and songwriters alike- all those with the understanding of the power of word, the wisdom to yield it.

In The Bifrost Incident it's still the same. His blood pumping and fueling the machine, running through arcane glyphs. He's always just been used for his blood, and even more irony drawn from it likely being Odin gaining the most use from his blood.

And yet, no matter how miniscule it may seem, Kvasir still lives on in his universe there too, in poets and songwriters and storytellers- somehow, The Mechanisms carry a piece of him in their travels ever since his death and Yddrasil's fall, just as you and I may have his blood in our veins.

[psalmsofpsychosis]

there are fic writers writing stories, and then there are darthfett writers, constructing narrative structure that would make Nietzsche almost believe in the inherent goodness of human nature,

[felizusnavidad]

HAMILTON?

[sunnifer]

it's 1982, and your ex-husband is dying. they're not telling you why, but he's dying like the man he loved and there's nothing either of you can do about it. you're with him in a hospital room you both know you've been in before, and he's clammy and he's shaking and you can barely look at him without feeling that sick bone-deep ache that's so familiar to you now it makes you want to disappear. he's looking at you like he doesn't know what to do and you see yourself in him. he's dying, and you don't like him, but you love him. so you kiss his forehead like he used to do with you and you hold him and you cry with him because you don't have anything else to give. he's cold to the touch, and he's already gone, but you cry with him and you don't mind if he's not crying with you because there's nothing either of you can do about it.

[swanparties]

bitches read sad books and then read sadder fan theories

[heavensfinest]

idk if it's better or worse that t*ylor sw*ft acknowledged how ridiculously similar Tortured Poets Department is to Dead Poets Society