#and using an interest in fantasy and sci fi as a starting topic

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Something I never hear anyone talk about in the 'why are Young Adults (late teens to early 30s) reading so much Young Adult (teens) fiction These Days' discussion is how surprisingly difficult it can be to transition from kids books to adult fiction.

And I don't mean in terms of content. Forget themes, characters, plots, etc. I'm talking pure practicality.

As a kid, most of the books you read are calibrated to you exactly. Your local library likely has a 'children's' section, and that section is likely split into smaller sub-sections based on age group. 0-5, 5-8, 8-12, teen. A lot of your interests and experiences are pretty easy to guess at based on average developmental stages (eg. most 16-18 year olds will relate to Coming Of Age stories), so it's probably pretty easy for you to walk into a bookshop or library and find a book aimed at you specifically.

But get to 18 (or younger) and start straying into the 'adult' section, and suddenly nothing is calibrated anymore. When people complain that all 'grownup fiction' is about white middle class heterosexual couples going through angsty divorces in their mid-forties, this is what they're complaining about. They can't find books they can personally relate to, or that are about topics that they are interested in.

And yeah, sure, books shouldn't have to be relatable to be good or enjoyable. But there's also nothing wrong with wanting to read a book about young people, when you're young. Or queer people, if you're queer. Or people from your particular culture, religion, or ethnicity.

Even if we ignore the relatability aspect entirely, there's also nothing wrong with wanting to read a fantasy book that isn't just 'Tolkien but drearier' or a sci-fi that wasn't written by some guy in the 1960s who thought that women were just another kind of alien.

The problem is, fundamentally, that finding the books you like amid the haystack is a skill that most people are not being taught.

As a result, when they get past YA and try using the old tricks of just picking up whatever is on the bestseller list at the moment, or whatever their local library is currently touting as their 'book of the week', they frequently end up with something that isn't suited to their tastes.

And maybe they love it and it opens up a whole new genre that they'd never considered, but more often they hate it but feel obliged to slog through because this is a 'grownup book' and they have decided they want to be a 'grownup reader'.

A few times being burned like this, and they come to the conclusion that all adult fiction is boring, and that the people who read it are all either mature geniuses of the type they could only hope to be, or slogging through like they were and only pretending to like it.

Thus they run back to the familiarity of YA—which is fine, to be clear, there's nothing actually wrong with reading YA as an adult— but there's every chance that somewhere on the bookshelves is a potential favourite author of theirs that they will now never know because they were never taught how to find them.

[mcsm-confessions]

We need more what-book-would-the-cast-read headcanons, stat. Nobody's invented television yet (or perhaps cinemas) so what form of entertainment is both historically accurate and available in-game? Books!

I'll start:

Jesse, as a turbo nerd, loves the heck out of whatever the in-univers equivalent of superhero comics is (knights, not laser beams), owns special editions of the Lord of the Rings, has fun with those campy space-opera sci-fi books and and occasionally picks up the occasional nonfiction book about obscure interesting topics, which her friends will then hear about nonstop for the next week or so. She has a special fondness for Charlotte's Web, which she used to read to Reuben when he was younger. She sometimes leafs through the latest Cosmo in the convenience store magazine rack as a guilty pleasure.

Olivia also enjoys a decent sci-fi novel (albeit less space opera and more hard science), likes murder mysteries, secretly indulges in a few chastely romantic Victorian classics, eats Linux user manuals for breakfast and gets the latest edition of Popular Redstonics mailed to the treehouse every fortnight. She has occasional arguments with Jesse over the organizational system of their shared library, which tends to lapse into chaos when the latter is in charge.

Axel shares Jesse's enthusiasm for superhero comics and is first in the queue to get the newest volumes for the both of them. His memoir and travel literature collection is substantial—his stamp collection sits proudly between—and he secretly reads poetry and has attempted to make his own tentatively awkward verses. He also subscribes to Backyard Demolitionists Weekly in the mail.

Petra doesn't mess with 'stuffy old books written by dead people' (classics), but still rereads Treasure Island and other gallivanting picaresque type novels in her spare time. She digs the Count of Monte Cristo but completely missed the message about the costly and potentially futile price of revenge. Anything history related that doesn't have multiple wars in it is like pulling teeth. She used to secretly look at the Playboys hidden in a chest in her father's room when no one was around.

Lukas is invested in a wide range of literary fiction, from historical novels to the weirder avant garde novellas, and has a soft spot for little felines in his books. He's not the most well versed in philosophy but had a brutal period in his late teens when he discovered Schopenhauer. East of Eden has a special place in his heart for certain familial similarities, but he's never thought to voice that out loud. On the rare occasion that he's really irate he'll burn through a standard slasher horror novel and then discreetly return it to the library. In the future, a whimsical passage in his authorized biography will note that he's one of the few authors who isn't on outrageous (or any) quantities of drugs when writing.

Ivor reads romance novels, the sappiest, bodice ripping Mills and Boons stuff. He hides it under extreme lock and key and would probably vaporize whoever found out about it. It's another thing he has in common with his mother, which he is apparently unaware of. He also composed atrocious poetry in his sulky teenage years, which was burnt long ago. Those Gary-Stu edgy grim fantasy protagonists appealed immensely to him, and was a phase that lasted until he got the chewing out of his life from Ellegaard when attempting the same mannerisms in the lab.

Aiden doesn't read and is proud of it because he's an arrogant numbskull.

~~~

[bluef00t]

heyy, you said a bit ago that you’d been reading comics but weren’t posting about them because they weren’t superhero comics, but I’d be interested in hearing about them, if you’d like to share

This post got LONG because yes, I LOVE talking about comics, thank you for asking :)

Let me start with a list of good titles and get into my thoughts more under the cut: R.U.R., Terrarium In Drawer, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Parable of the Sower, Watchmen, Parenthesis, and The Nice House On The Lake.

Starting out with the realization that I never posted my MICE haul to Tumblr, because my favorite read of the year so far was from that:

R.U.R. (drawn by Kateřina Čupová) is well-executed and SO well-aligned with my interests that it's crazy. It's an adaptation of the 1920s play which I somehow still haven't read, and it's just… robots, foundational vintage sci-fi, supply-chain parables, cleverly deployed stageplay metaphors, doomed tower defense scenarios, "simplistic" eurocomic styles that carry massive amounts of emotion, gorgeously bold CMY watercolors with strong color symbolism—everything. My copy is a misprint (two pages are duplicated, though I don't think anything is missing) and it's too bad that the English translation uses a machine-typed font where I suspect the original dialogue was handwritten, but those are small quibbles. Some day I'll read the play to compare/contrast; the logic of text-story-to-comic adaptations always fascinates me.

Since I began typing up this ask, though, I read something which takes a close second place: Terrarium In A Drawer, by Ryoko Kui. Really effectively Twilight-Zone-y little anthology in a variety of styles (both visually and subject-wise). It's often unclear going into a story how you're going to feel by the last page: is there a joke punchline coming? A surprisingly astute, perspective-changing observation? A deeply unsettling, unanswerable question about being alive? Most stories have all three, in some order or another. God, I love Ryoko Kui—she's maybe the ONLY author to successfully convince me that fantasy has certain merits over science fiction when it comes to looking at the world, not just as escapism.

I also, with the release of the second book, got around to My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. There's a very established American Literary Graphic Novel Topic: "precocious gay(/disabled/ethnic) coming-of-age in the 60s(/70s/80s) filtered through escapism into mass media and obsession with the Holocaust(/war/sexual/family) traumas of a previous generation who would rather repress all that". (Maus, Fun Home, and two other books I read called I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together and Victory Parade fit in here as well.) So the plot is "transgressive" in a very familiar way, but that cluster of topics does remain consistently interesting to me. And honestly, I wasn't reading it for the PLOT. The artwork, the integration of famous paintings and pulp cover motifs, is crazy: it reminded me of the forms of Chris Van Allsburg and the color crosshatch of Melanie Gillman, both turned up to 11. The format isn't conventionally comic-y, but the text and image were still inextricable in a way that felt intuitive to me. Without panels, the text walks you through landscapes.

I re-read Parenthesis and read Crazy Like A Fox and the unrelated A Fox In My Brain, which are members of another Adult Graphic Novel subcluster—brain-illness educational autobio. Parentheses, about a cognition-disrupting tumor, was my favorite; it was originally published in French, so my BD bias may be showing.

Parable of the Sower knocked me off balance by being the most brutal graphic novel I've read in a WHILE. I knew Octavia Butler from Bloodchild and Kindred, so I was expecting something messed up, just, holy shit. I should have read the original book back when I was a teenager; it would have changed my brain chemistry and fed my little false prophet complex. The translation to a "comic" felt a little clunky, with dense and not very well integrated chunks of text—it was more "illustrated" than anything but I did like having faces to match with names.

Watchmen, which I already posted a bit about on my superhero comics blog (and probably will more later) was a surprise in the opposite direction. I'd heard a lot about it being super brutal and cynical and deconstructive, but, uh, after reading Moore's Miracleman [ACTUALLY INSANE] I found it merely "noir" and maybe despondently neolib by comparison. It probably has as much in common with Tom Strong, Moore's most optimistic genre loveletter, as it does with Miracleman.

Oh, and I read Where The Body Was. It was fine. I like whodunits, but the payoff didn't make me kick myself in a really satisfying way, and the framing and art was all very normal modern American comic. I blame The Nice House On The Lake a couple years back for raising my expectations about things that look like that. Which, hey, speaking of which, apparently there's a second series being published now, The Nice House By The Sea! Putting that on the reading list now, right behind Boys Weekend by Mattie Lubchansky when that hold comes in…

[rphunter]

21, he/they, PST roleplayer looking for 19+ roleplayers!

I’m not new to roleplay, but it has been a while since I’ve been able to befriend and roleplay with others. I say that as a disclaimer, just so you know I may not be 100% confident in what I’m doing, but as long as you’re willing to work with me I think we’ll get along fine!

I roleplay on discord servers. I’m a lit to advanced-lit writer, and like to get out at least 4-5 paragraphs per message, but this can vary more or less depending. I’d like someone who’s at least lit, no one-liner responses. Once roleplay starts, I will try to get at least one message back every day, but of course I have a life outside of roleplay and this isn’t a guarantee. I will do my best to update you any time I may be inactive. I don’t expect you to be crazy active either, I totally respect your time in the real world, but I would ask you to also update me if you’re going to be inactive for more than two days.

I’m particularly interested in creating long-lasting friendships, if you’re not interested in collaborating on stories or plots and don’t enjoy ooc chatter, we probably won’t click.

I’m looking for someone who’s interested in creating our world and story together, I have some of my own ideas but I’m really interested in hearing others too, and this isn’t something you have to have planned characters for (since I don’t either). I do see fantasy or sci-fi elements as a must, I don’t really enjoy modern or slice-of-life rps as much, but I don’t mind incorporating those elements. Often times characters I make are non-human in fantasy worlds (human adjacent though).

Alternately, a fandom I have ocs for and would want to roleplay for is Jujutsu Kaisen, so if you happen to enjoy jjk and have ocs, reach out to me for that as well! I’m thinking of making some kind of au if I do a jjk rp, but I’m not adverse to canon storyline, as long as ocs are involved. I’m happy to play any canon character (my knowledge of jjk ends at season two, fyi).

Wills: cc x oc, oc x oc, angst, non-human/monsters (vampires, werewolves, fantasy species), nsfw is fine but not as a primary focus (more like something that will build up naturally, also I’m not as experienced in writing it), I don’t mind violence or stressful topics as long as it’s not crazy extreme (we’ll discuss boundaries together)

Won’ts: Non-con, incest/stepcest, major age gaps, ferals, cc x cc (without oc presence in story), aging up minor characters for romantic roleplay. !I won’t roleplay with people who use ai images, ai writing, or RFC/RPF!

Please reach out via dm to narrative.sound on discord if interested!

,

[queerlilchinchin]

Vote For My First Short-Form (Free Subscriber) Story For Substack

I wanted to give you all the option to request the genre I start with on substack. I still struggle to know what genre(s) my readers actually enjoy reading from me. All I know is I tend to lean toward darker topics/genres, but I wanted to see if you all had opinions on what genre you think would be most entertaining to see for my first short story.

So!

Since I'm trying to have the first story post posted by the middle of next week, I figured I will post a poll for this question and make it voteable within the next 3 days.

If you have never read my stuff, and would like samples of how I write/what kinds of topics I tend to go for, you can find my author site below:

Click on "Click Here to View WIP List" to see a list of my WIPs listed on the site to go to their respective pages.

If you're interested in subscribing to my substack, you can find it linked below:

Thank you in advance for the votes and I look forward to creating something fun and entertaining with whatever you vote for!

[robinswrites]

About Me

Hi! My name's Robin, and after years of writing and posting fanfic (on a different account, which I will be continuing with), I've decided to start trying to get my original fiction published. I am A Trans who doesn't much care what pronouns/gendered terms you use for me as long as you're not being deliberately insulting. The various stories I'm writing or want to write vary in genre from fantasy to science fiction and horror, but they're all queer (in different ways, because queerness isn't necessarily approached in SF/F cultures in the same way as in our own, and they don't necessarily fit the often very romance-focussed conventional ideas of what queer rep looks like, but it is present in everything I write).

I am an adult, and my writing is aimed at adults (I've noticed a few people getting their stories labelled as YA when they're really not aimed at that audience at all, so I thought I'd make that clear right from the start), but I'm not writing anything so explicit that I'd object to someone under 18 following me if they're interested in my stories. I will use tags and TWs on my posts--feel free to let me know if I forget.

WIPs

My three main WIPs are novels that I intend to publish (I'm an incurable WIP-hopper and have been alternating between writing bits of each of these for years...), so I'm not going to be posting the stories themselves online, but I will be sharing character and setting info, discussing progress, taking part in the usual writeblr ask events, etc. One is a deliberately over-the-top space opera sci-fi, one is a modern-day fantasy, and the other a mediaeval fantasy. At some point, they might even have titles. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

I'm also sometimes going to be writing short stories and submitting to anthologies and magazines--I'll post updates on where to find any that get accepted.

And at some point soon, a free short story will be going up here as a taster of my work!

I'm also currently doing a major rewrite of the plot outline for a webcomic I initially plotted out as a teenager--once I've got the story to make sense, I'm hoping to start drawing and posting some stuff for that.

What else?

I'm hoping to use this account to follow and get to know other authors, to follow and interact with publishers, take part in any writing events that look interesting--and also to some extent for general blogging.

You'll probably see some reblogs of gifs of films I like, and other mostly-on-topic reblogs (I'm not going to use this account for random memes).

I might share music I've been listening to, or sometimes post about anything interesting I've been doing/places I've been going. I do aim to stick to interesting stuff--I'm not going to be blogging about what I ate for breakfast, but if there's something that I think really would interest SF/F fans and writers, I might do a blog post, especially if I got some cool photos, instead of getting home and thinking too late "I really should have taken some photos of that [supposedly haunted secondhand bookshop / sword I was tempted to buy in an antique shop / whatever]".

Fandom stuff and other "general nonsense" posts and reblogs will stay on my other account.

Looking forward to sharing what I do here on writeblr and getting to know more original fiction writers in this community!

[weepingdragons]

Lookin for Moots <3

Hiya lovelies! ^-^

My name's Ally/Meebo, it's nice to meet you all! I'm coming back to the site after a few years, so I decided to start back at step one. That means I need to find some new mutuals! Here's some stuff you might wanna know about me:

I'm 26, She/They, stoner from the US. I've been practicing witchcraft for about 8 years, but I practice my own way at my own speed. I also used to be big into writing, reading, and photography which I would love to get back into. I have a tough time staying focused on my areas of interest (I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD but it wouldn't surprise anyone), so I have plenty of things I like to talk about.

I like being creative when I have the energy, but my interest pretty much changes daily. Some of my recent creations have been crochet, paintings/collages, clay trinkets, sewing, marker/colored pencil art/doodles, etc. Crochet and painting/doodling/drawing are my usuals, but it's everchanging

I am a treasure trove of various interests but I also like learning about new stuff! Just a small handful of general topics I like:

Music - EDM, Pop Punk, Nu Metal, 80s/90s new wave/alt, uhhhhh idk man I like a lot of stuff haha I LOVE suggestions!!

Fleetwood Mac, Tool, Chevelle, Hail the Sun, Perfect Circle, SoaD, Smashing Pumpkins, REM, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Evanescence, Disturbed, Emarosa, Set it Off, San Holo, Jonathan Coulton…

Games -

LOZ (OoT and Windwaker mostly), Animal Crossing, Elden Ring, Cult of the Lamb, Baulder's Gate 3, WoW, Chibi Robo, Metroid, Sky: Children of Light, Cthulu Saves the World

Shows/Movies - Sci-fi, Fantasy, Historical, Musical, Theater, Horror, Drama, Animated, Cartoons, Anime

Firefly (/Serenity), Always Sunny, Parks and Rec, Buffy, Invader Zim, JoJo, Avatar, old adult swim cartoons (Venture Bros., Metalocolypse, Harvey Birdman, etc.), Star Trek (DS9 specifically so far!)…

Things I want to get into (or Back into, in some cases haha)-

D&D, MtG, playing guitar, tattoos, divination, cooking/baking, gardening, HP Lovecraft, Shakespear…

The list goes on! I'm sure you can tell I'm a weird one, but if any of the above strikes your fancy, please feel free to dm me. I'm also looking for pen pals and Discord groups, so please let me know if you think I'd fit in anywhere!

Tyty byyyye

[wordsmithandwanderings]

Writeblr Reintroduction

I started this blog under the URL "magicalwriting" and lost all motivation for it. So I wanna reintroduce myself because I like being in the writeblr community ^_^

So hi! I'm wordsmithandwanderings, but you can call me Ren. I want to use this blog to post updates on my own writing, and interact with other writers!

I love reading and writing fantasy mostly, but I also am interested in writing sci-fi, contemporary coming-of-age, and horror. My dream is to be a published author, but I have never completed a first draft of a novel in my life. My main goal this year is to finish a first draft of a novel, no matter how awful it may be.

A little bit into my current WIPs. I'll keep this section sparse because I'm scared of being plagiarized, but also because these ideas are subject to change the more I work on them lol.

TDW: A YA Fantasy WIP

My main project I'm trying to finish a first draft for. What I will tell you is that it features demons, angels, a dark forest with monsters and secrets within, and a protagonist who undergoes a curse and a crisis of faith.

Superhuman: A YA Sci-fi WIP

If you've seen any of my older posts, you might have seen me talk about Superhuman. It follows the same protagonist, but the story has changed DRASTICALLY from the original premise I had. I like to see it as a more realistic take on the superhero genre, if that makes sense?

And there's many more, but they're only vague ideas that I daydream about in the form of AMVs or edits lmao.

I also have a Substack which I try to post weekly called Wordy Ramblings! I talk about writing (which I also upload here), but also a bunch of other topics that I feel don't fit this blog. If it sounds interesting to you, check it out!

I'd love to interact more with other people in the community, so I'm hoping to do some asks or tag games in the future. I'd also love to check out other writeblr blogs, so please tell me about your own works if you feel like it!

[riteliso]

I think an important aspect of "redemption arcs" is tragedy.

Not as in "Oh, so many bad things happened to them-- no wonder they're bad! What a poor little baby!"

I'm talking more that a character needs to make decisions that cause them to suffer, and they need to keep doing it.

Zuko and Catra are both good examples of this-- yeah they make progress, and become better more complete people, but from the start they're already good. The reason I put "redemption arcs" in quotes is because these characters don't need redemption as much as they need to break away from the context that's forcing them to hurt people.

When you're designing an antagonist who you intend to redeem, you need to realize you're not making a villain. You're making a hero. People will grab onto and love the same things they love in their heroes, you just get to be a lot more creative with their flaws.

Zuko and Catra are very much good examples of a sort of "genre" of redeemable antagonist. They're underdogs. They're abused, and feel like they can take what's owed to them as long as they make the right moves. Zuko very much follows the rules set out by his country, whereas Catra is very much a schemer, but they come from the same place.

They're both underdogs who are willing to go too far to hurt our main protagonists, but usually end up hurting themselves instead and making their situations even worse. Even when they DO win, it's usually not for long.

While I personally think the "I win the battle, I lose the war" monologue lays it on a bit thick, it does well encapsulate the pattern that was used both in and out of universe to keep Catra secure in a position of perpetual second-fiddle.

No matter how much she tries to climb that ladder, thing is, and this applies to real life, too--

You cannot hide the fact that you are good. Especially not from people who hate whatever kind of goodness you are.

Catra's cut out for the theatrics. She's cut out for hurting people. She's cut out for being mean. She's cut out for ENJOYING all of that, easy.

But despite all of that, she could never be at the top of some evil food-chain, because then what? It's gone over, sure, but Catra doesn't really wanna take over the world. All she really wants is to mess with Adora.

That can be viewed as either a weak or strong characteristic-- Usually I'm against characters being written with one singular goal in mind, and that being their love interest, but She-ra kind of gets a pass, because honestly-- it's a romance. There's everything possible to enjoy in the show, but honestly I don't understand looking back how people thought Adora and Catra weren't going to end up together, because--

That's what the whole show was about.

I'm yammering but I've decided to continue despite this not being the original topic.

It really is odd to me, as someone who came to this recently, seeing people from the past believing Adora or Catra were going to end up anywhere besides with each-other. Maybe it's just being media savvy, but it would have been unthinkable for things to turn out any other way after the first few episodes.

I don't think I'd been spoiled on anything going into She-ra, but there wasn't a single doubt in my mind they'd end up together. I think especially after princess prom, I was like-- "So this is what the show is ABOUT."

Yes, it's a sci-fi fantasy adventure. That's the setting. But the core was always romance. As much as it wears a "the power of friendship" tee it got at hot topic, She-ra is very much about the power of romance. Doing everything you can for those you love. Not those you love in a friendly sense, or a family sense, but those you truly love. The people who make you believe for a fleeting moment that maybe true love is real, and you're one of the lucky few to stumble upon it.

And I just think that's nice. Silly as it is, there's something really wonderful about subverting the "romantic sub-plot" and making the romance-- the MAIN plot.

Once Catra joins the crew, especially-- Once she realizes she has to change, and starts actually speaking her mind instead of just being a snippy little hiss-baby, (complimentary,) the romance becomes the driving force. Yes, it's narratively DRAMATIC for Adora to take the heart, not knowing if it'll kill her or not. But without Catra, that's all it is. With Catra there, there's suspense, drama, heartbreak, abandonment, betreyal-- it becomes infinitely more multifaceted than it was before.

And honestly that does go for-- a lot of the series before that, as well. My first watch-though I was certainly pretty checked-the-fuck-out whenever Catra and Adora weren't on-screen together.

Anyway I'm done talking I gotta go work out byeeeee

[ruejayhamilton]

Writeblr Intro

Hello, friends!

I never made an official intro for myself, so I guess I’ll make one now.

Pls, reblog/and reply to this post to help boost this blog and support my writing. ✍️

Anyways, let’s get started:

Personal Stuff 🩷💜🩵

My real name is Teagan, but I like to go by Rue Jay Hamilton, Cosette Altair, Saga Rose, and Vanessa Night. Each pseudonym is catered toward a different audience, so for the sake of this blog, I’d prefer to be referred to as Rue, or Rue Jay.

I identify as bisexual or queer, and I am autistic. My pronouns are she/they/fae. I believe in God, but in a very progressive way (as in God is love). I also believe I was a faery in a past life, and I believe that all religions have their right to exist.

I’m a Gen Z American 🇺🇸 who took five years of French class and was in French Honor Society. I wouldn’t say I’m bilingual, as I still have to use WordReference to look up words, but I’m mildly conversational in French, chaotic in English, and eager to learn other languages. I’m a pharmacy tech in addition to writing, as well as an actor/actress, dancer for fun, singer/songwriter, and novelist.

Fun facts!

My music taste is unconfined. As long as it has a good message and beat, I love music.

I’m a Shakespearean fanatic — Romeo & Juliet is my favorite play.

I love Sarah J. Maas. I have most books by her.

I love the Descendants franchise. Cameron Boyce was my favorite actor in the series. (RIP Cameron Boyce 😔)

One of my favorite musical artists is Dove Cameron. My favorite song by her is Lethal Woman.

Another series I love is The Hunger Games. I’m currently reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and I can’t wait for Sunrise of the Reaping. (Also: RIP Donald Sutherland 🪦)

A show I love is High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. My favorite character is Ashlyn (played by Julia Lester) because she’s so powerful in her character arcs. (Madlyn forever 😻)

I have a boyfriend (Taken 🔒❤️ 7/13/2024).

About My Writing!

I write a variety of fiction genres, but it mainly comes down to romance (contemporary/tragic/dark), plays, historical fiction, fanfiction, contemporary fiction , fantasy (high fantasy/dark fantasy/urban fantasy/etc), and occasionally sci-fi (dystopian).

The most common themes are love, self-discovery, and identity, with focal points on diversity, especially in the LGBTQ community. Serious topics can be found. Moral ambiguity has piqued my interest. There is a lot of drama and death, with some comedy. I call my stuff dark. Relationships are also central to my books.

Works In Progress

The Enchanted Garden

When Teah inherits her Aunt Margery’s estate upon late aunt’s death, little does she expect to be thrust into protecting a centuries’s-old secret of her aunt’s beloved garden, one that the sun always shines upon, one full of mysticalness and enchantment. And little does she expect to find love in a flower-shifter.

However, all things come at a cost. Her neighbor is a bounty hunter set on capturing esoteric creatures, and the more time Teah spends in the garden, the more curious the bounty hunter becomes. With time, it becomes clear that a line must be drawn. As the protector of the garden, she must make hard decisions to protect the creatures she harbors, and only time will tell if that’s enough.

[d-dormant]

For the ask game:

🍓 ⇢ how did you get into writing fanfiction? 

🕯️ ⇢ on a scale from 1 to 10, how much do you enjoy editing? why is that?

🐇 ⇢ do you prefer writing original characters, reader inserts, or a mix of both? 

🔪 ⇢ what's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

🧩 ⇢ what will make you click away from a fanfiction immediately?

🍓 How did you get into writing fanfiction?

Okay long story.

So when I was in primary school, I made an account on odnoklassniki.ru. It's a Russian social media, kind of like Facebook. At the time I was really into The Sims so I'd spend a lot of time in different fandom communities on the website.

Not sure about how it is these days, but in the late 00s-early 10s the Sims community had a big culture of comics. You'd come up with a story, make sims of your characters, take screenshots that fit your plot and treat them as a strip in your comic. You could make a photoalbum in one of the popular public fanpages, upload your pics and in the description write the corresponding part of the story. We had all sorts of fanfics: lots of romance and drama, some thrillers, some sci-fi and fantasy. The readers would just find a story to their liking and flip through the photos to read, like/rate them and leave comments if they wanted to show support.

I thought it was insanely cool (still do, really), and I desperately wanted to make comics of my own. The problem was that my game was rather lame. The Sims players make tons of custom content, and comics authors would use a lot of them: cool hair, better makeup, fashionable clothes and furniture, and poses for sims to stand in to make shots even more convincing. I had no Internet access on my computer to get that custom content, so I was making do with my plain game and it was making me insecure. I had a feeling that my stories are overlooked because the visuals are just not up to the standart.

And then one day as I was scrolling through the comics, I fould an album called "Fanfics". I'd never heard of the term yet, so I was intrigued. The photoalbum had no screenshots — only covers of stories, and authors would write the story itself in the comments of the picture. You'd just scroll though paragraphs of text (and the readers' reviews too, cause it was all in one place) and read.

I was like, "oh my god so you can write comics with no pictures??? that's exactly what i need!!!" So I started writing "fanfics". Mind you, in my head, "fanfics" was what you'd call your sims comics with no screenshots. I had no idea that a) fanfics are not a Sims thing, you can write about whatever you want and b) I was, in fact, writing original stories, not fanfics – the only thing that attached them to a fandom was that I was uploading it in a Sims fandom community.

That would go on for a year or two, and then in 2014 Gravity Falls came out and all my friends were into it. One day in my feed I saw that my friend had updated her status. It was a lengthy exerpt of a text that she called her "new fanfic" and there was a hyperlink at the end for those who wanted to read the rest. I did, because the text was interesting — not to mention I was like "Wait, how is that a fanfic?" — so I found myself on ficbook, the biggest Russian fanfiction platform. And it blew my fucking minddddd

I realised fanfic was a thing you could make (and a thing I actually had made sometimes, because I'd write stories and poems about Winx Club, I just hadn't known the name for it). I spent the whole spring-summer reading, and then in May I saw "Maleficent" in the theatre and so it went.

🕯️On a scale from 1 to 10, how much do you enjoy editing? Why is that?

Zerooo! Maybe 1 at best. I hate it because at the point when I'm supposed to do final editing, I'm honestly sick and tired of the text and itching to just upload it and get some distance (and find all the embarrassing typos in the following days, of course). Most of the time all I can make myself do it proofread it one time. I read it out loud so the mistakes in syntax and style are more noticeable, and that's usually the extent of my editing.

In my defence, I do most of the editing while writing, so I'm usually not left with much to change.

🐇 Do you prefer writing original characters, reader inserts, or a mix of both?

Original characters. Not sure if I've ever done a proper reader insert in a fanfic.

🔪 What's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

For Ornithology, probably menstrual pads in the Middle Ages. Got to read a lot about what medieval people thought of health, women, and youth.

Or the inside structure of a windmill. Or a detailed plan of an Irish town as it stood in the 14th century. Thank god for libgen because that time I found a book with exactly what I wanted and more. Overall, the story being set in the medieval times makes for a lot of fun searches. Wouldn't say they're weird necessarily, but maybe a bit niche.

🧩 What will make you click away from a fanfiction immediately?

Honestly, not anything at this point, I'm that desperate ahah

I guess the closest I have to a pet peeve is when the dialogue is formatted in a confusing way. When you can't tell who's saying what or to whom just by the punctuation or the phrases themselves. It gets me out of the text very quickly.

Thank you for the ask! 💜

[the-ampersand]

About sandbox campaigns

Let me tell you a story.

Last year I went to a big sci-fi/fantasy con in my country. I had been planning to go for years because there is a big emphasis in talks with authors and there were many relating to ttrpg topics. There was one about sandbox campaigns! I was excited!

But sadly, I left many of the talks very disappointed. The one that hurt me the most was, precisely, the one about sandboxes. In it, a national expert in the ttrpg industry explained how there are two (2) kinds of sandbox campaigns, either open world or "social". Maybe three if you also count urban campaigns as sandboxes.

"Ok," I thought "I completely disagree, but let's see where this goes".

Then, the speaker proceeded to explain her prep process. In a social campaign she firts creates the factions. She likes Legend of the Five Rings a lot, so she usually uses the five usual clans of the settings.

"Alright. That's reasonable".

Then, she proceeds to populate their factions with about seven to ten NPCs per faction.

I left at that very instant absolutely astounded.

In my personal opinion, sandbox campaigns don't need to be an exercise of immense prep from the GM. They can be and if it works for some people I am glad for them and I hope they have fun with that prep. But I don't think that's a really reasonable way to manage this kind of campaign for the majority of GMs and even less so for the majority of tables. (And giving a talk about it without properly disclaiming it can set up an impossible standard that might discourage many novice GMs that would consider sandbox campaigns as too labor intensive).

I believe sandbox campaigns should play with the interest of the players. As a GM one should set up an interesting backdrop to explore and interact with, with a varying degree of prep according to one's own interests. And then the players are the ones that will guide the prep needed for the next session by stating their intentions. I have seen several people here clamouring for the many benefits of asking one's players "So what's your plan for the next session, then?". And I think those benefits double when playing a sandbox campaign!

It allows for a true feeling of discovery, not only for the players, but for the GM as well! The GM doesn't need to know everything from the beginning, they can discover it in a fractal way, following the interests of the table (which includes the GM themselves, let's not forget that).

Let me give you an example.

I am currently starting a sandbox campaign based on Skerples' Magical Industrial Revolution. I am mashing it into my DIE campaign, but that's not important. This setting revolves around technology and the grave danger it poses when left unatended to the whims of idealistic inventors and shrewd investors looking to make a fortune. I did as much prep as I wanted:

Being a urban setting, I made small sheets for different neighborhoods and points of interest of the city. I also got the help of my players to do this with a small session of i'm sorry did you say street magic by Caro Asercion.

I set up small scenes to present to the players the different pre-apocalyptic inventions that will destroy the city if left unchecked. (And I added a ninth invention for DIE reasons even though that breaks the number 8 theme in the module)

And that's that! We are already three sessions in and we had an impromptu heist into the university, spent a day selling turnips in the market and met a guy who knows he is inside a narrative (DIE stuff). Next time we are going to attend to a flying machines engineering duel because that's what one of the players asked!

Admittedly, a lot of the prep in this campaign is already done by Skerples, shared with me through the module. But I could have gone with a vibe, a list of cool places to visit, a list of things loosely going on on the setting and a list of names to invoke when a new NPC appears. And you could probably do without any of those things!

What you need to set up a sandbox campaign is not a huge load of prep. Is just enough to present an engaging premise and to answer confidently enough to whatever shenanigans your players throw themselves into.

I have yet to write a single faction sheet. Or a NPC background. I possibly will. But that will be whenever I consider it fun enough.

[dei2dei]

Ideas: Gotta Catch 'Em All!

(look, I know one whole Pokemon reference and I'm gonna use it.)

I was tossing around ideas with @calypsid about writing events and coming up with ideas and how to write for big events - in fandom, for the monthlong ones especially, but also if you're someone looking at submitting original fiction to a themed anthology or to a zine, or when you just want to WRITE dammit but the ideas won't come. When the idea hutch is empty and the plotbuns won't come, when the creative spring is trickling or you're at the bottom of the well of inspiration, hope is not lost. We put our heads together and came up with a baker's dozen ways to get ideas and look at prompts to get new inspiration when you need it. So if you want 'em, jump below the cut!

Stop looking at words.

Look at art! Listen to music! Maybe what you need is some song lyrics to get your brain going, or art. Play Sudoku. Go to a coffee shop and watch people. Change your mental or physical environment and see what happens.

Prompt lists

Don’t limit yourself to whatever event you’re writing for! If it’s for a fandom ship week, hit up a themed month prompt list (such as Fluffuary, AUgust, or Whumptober). If you’re trying to think of ideas for a zine pitch, trawl prompt lists from fandom or creative writing websites. Mash the TVTropes random trope button until something clicks.

Tarot spreads

Even if you don’t read tarot on your own, you can find websites where you can do tarot readings. Treat it as a story prompt generator: pick three cards, one that is your protagonist, one that is their goal, one that is their obstacle. Look up the meanings. Go wild! You can use the cards for protagonists, antagonists, story arcs…

Lists

Not prompt lists - but every idea you can think of adjacent to a prompt. Tropes, colors, sayings, characters, types (e.g. species of apple, types of wildflowers, names of cocktails)...

An alphabetical list with an idea for each letter of the alphabet.

A list of 20 ideas, as close or as absolutely wild as you want.

A timed list (write ideas for 5/10/15 minutes). The first chunk may be easy, the last few minutes impossibly hard, but right in the middle where your mind is starting to stretch? That may be perfect.

Once you have a list of any flavor, start looking for patterns: that’s a sign your brain is interested in SOMETHING. What ideas/symbols keep showing up?

Look for unexpected intersections

Ideas or prompts may have unexpected links. Randomize your list! Consider resonances between different prompts; they may seem different in a different order. Pick a not obvious combination of two prompts and follow it to the end - what if you put together “pirate” and “arranged marriage”? Use a wheel spinning picker and see what two things the computer matches up.

You can also take a pair of commonly-associated opposites, pick out their most common stereotypical traits. Now swap them. 

Play with other media

Take characters from one piece of media, the setting from a second (hey look, a fusion/AU!). What resonates between them? Grab a non-fiction book about a topic you’re interested in and read that. Ideas might percolate from a number of unrelated sources into one Super Cool Idea.

Change the setting

Turn a sci-fi show into a fantasy setting, or vice-versa. Add monsters. Add gods; add gods with reality-bending dice; add gods with reality-bending dice who are malicious. Flip your characters' genders. Remove the concept of gender entirely. Send your characters to the dimension next door, where only one thing has changed. Or many things. Or everything. Take the characters out of the plot of your fandom, or replace them with side characters; what changes?

Change your mind

Take the prompt at face value. Or, treat it sarcastically. Subvert the trope - or don't subvert the trope. Write the thing you've always wanted to see, even if you think it won't work. Turn everything about the prompt on its head and look underneath for spare ideas. Come at it from every angle you can think of.

Other people

Talk to people about the prompt. Read Reddit or Tumblr conversations, even ones only vaguely associated with the prompt. Let your mind go in new and interesting directions. 

Cool words

Have you run across an awesome word you wish you could use in a story, or a turn of phrase? Write a story around that. Or if you have a list of cool words you keep anyway, flip back to it, see if there are any that might come together in a story.

Titles

If you have a title you've always wanted to use, let the title inspire the fic instead of the other way around. 

First Sentences

Just start writing first sentences, whatever ones come to mind. Don’t be precious about them; the goal isn’t perfect sentences, the goal is something to get your brain moving. Don’t worry about continuing the story yet! Try and get a bunch down without writing any more of the story. If one speaks to you and demands to be written, go back to it after you’ve got your list down.

Deconstruct a story you love and then rebuild it!

Retell a favorite story (or a hated story you thought you could do better). How did they do X? Why did you love (or hate) something so much? Can you do that with some of your ideas? Take out the main character and their sidekick; how does the story read with just the secondary characters? What if you add someone new? How would the story look different as a documentary, a chatfic, an epistolary collection?

Some Links:

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (https://sf-encyclopedia.com/) - includes almost 15,000 entries for words associated with sci-fi. Scroll through, pick (3, 5, 7…) and shove them into a story. Or learn about new tropes/concepts/ideas.

Deep Water Prompts (https://deepwaterwritingprompts.tumblr.com/) - some Weird Prompts (several hundred) you can twist and interpret to your heart’s desire.

Kathleen Jennings’ short story “Some Ways to Retell a Fairy Tale” (https://www.tor.com/2023/11/08/some-ways-to-retell-a-fairy-tale-kathleen-jennings) is also a great list of ideas for ways to, well, retell any story.

[thecurioustale]

I am going to try to write here actively again. ("Again," heh; I know I was only active here for an extremely short period many years ago.) To be completely transparent with you, let me explain where I am coming from and what some of my personal limitations and challenges are:

This space will be for discussing both my fantasy story The Curious Tale and my sci-fi Galaxy Federal story, both of which have a novel in active development. Both of these novels are well underway, and my progress in recent years and recent months has been very encouraging. Increasingly, I have given more time to working on them even when I am not inspired, i.e. I have been grinding a lot more (a good thing, in this instance). But at the same time, each novel is well under half-finished in word count. I am fully committed to both endeavors; they are "inevitable" insofar as their completion is only a matter of time (and so the caveat that I may die before they finish always applies, lol). But it is likely to be several more years before the first of these two novels is finished (and I don't know which one that will be).

My reason for splitting my efforts between two novels instead of one is that each world scratches different creative itches for me, and together they provide an outlet for over 90 percent of my creative self-expression needs, whereas if I were to work on them one at a time I would often be plagued with creative needs that have no outlet, which would frustrate my efforts toward whichever one I was working on. For some time I had put The Curious Tale on hold to work on Galaxy Federal, my reasoning being that the latter would be a lighter, smaller affair and would finish quickly. However, that ended up not being the case—at least in terms of the timescale of writing the book—and I realized a couple of years ago that I was committing a folly, and so began working on either novel at my discretion.

What I have to be smart about, and very careful about, in trying to build an active presence on here, is that I have a couple of serious restrictions that I have to work around: First, I can't reveal too much about what's actually in these stories, at least not until much closer to publication. When I was young I was a pretty open book, but in the 2010s I came around to the idea that this was a bad move and that audiences would almost universally enjoy the story more if I didn't slowly trickle out its secrets ahead of publication. So I've played my cards close to the vest these past few years, and I've said very little indeed about the Galaxy Federal novel in particular. This restriction on revealing story details makes it hard for me to find topics to write about in a setting like this. Second, I have to be careful not to put too much time and effort into any posts that I do make here. Due to mental health challenges and my extremely limited mental bandwidth / spoons, I've operated for the past several years under the successful rule of "Don't write about the story when you can just be writing the story itself," which I deem successful because it has corresponded to fewer distractions and more available creative energy for manuscript writing.

So, between these two major restrictions, I need for my posts here to be relatively brief and I also need to find interesting things to talk about that aren't just story giveaways. I've found in my weekly Patreon essays that whenever I do attempt to brush up against discussing the story I often end up stopping just short in a way that I feel has to be pretty unsatisfying for readers. So I am definitely open to suggestions for topics of discussion!

The reason I am choosing this old Tumblr account for this effort is because I know I have at least a handful of people here who are interested in at least one of these two novels, and who use Tumblr on a regular basis. The day will come when I need to start "building my platform" again in order to make these works visible to the public ahead of their publication. I think this is a good starting point because even though Tumblr seems to be in decline, by coming here I would know that I am not talking to an empty room. In the future, however, I may move to a different venue. I really don't know; I'm just saying that I'm not promising that this will be THE place to go forever, ya know?

In the meantime, I will not be doing any social media crossposting, or creating different content for different venues. Other than my weekly Patreon essays, and the occasional indulgent musing on my personal journal, this Tumblr page will be the only place where I talk publicly about either story—at least for the time being. If it goes well here, I will probably try reactivating one of my other old social media channels and doing some crossposting.

I will try to post here at least three times a week, with no fixed calendar, and ideally I will post something almost every day. I will commit to running this trial at minimum till the Autumn Equinox in a little over six weeks, and I will reevaluate then.

Please, if you do have any interest in this, don't be shy chiming in with comments or asks or reblogs. On one level I am here for myself, doing the whole "platform-building" thing, but in another sense I am here because I would like for more people than just me to be excited about these works. Two different sides of the same coin, I suppose, but, given that one of my chief struggles in life is alienation and the search for belonging, it's hard for me to see myself sticking with this if no one ever engages with me. Tell me what you'd like me to talk about, and I will aim to please!

[fateandloveentwined]

City C, University P -- the way modern chinese names places

Alright, you may have come across such initial-based namings in books, danmei and other cnovels: City S, University P, C市 (City C), S大 (University S)

-- is it lazy translation? why aren't they giving places actual names?

A tad bit of informal history below:

When did it start?

As a person very much inexperienced in chinese historical literature, I couldn't say for sure either. But what I do know, is that it has been in writing since the 20th century (around the 1920s and after). You see renowned writers of that time like Lu Xun 鲁迅 and Zhu Ziqing 朱自清 using these initials.

(I don't have concrete examples in mind, so I'm flipping about what I have around me, and Zhu Ziqing and Lu Xun's books happen to be near me so -- let me use their works as examples of the day.)

There's this novella Lu Xun wrote, with a protagonist which he named 阿Q (read as "Ah-Q"). I also see in his short stories that he named a dog S, a side character 小D (Little D), and a city S城 (City S).

Zhu Ziqing tends to write more about realistic things that happen in his life in the form of short writings, and for that reason he uses initials way less. He did refer to a person by "Y" in one of the pieces though.

So what are they doing?

So around that time of Lu Xun (we're in the republican era) there's a movement called the May Fourth Movement, and out of the movement it spurred in the literary realm the New Culture Movement. I honestly don't want to go into the details and confuse everyone with my inexperience here, what is worth noting is that they began promoting "modern chinese" (白话 bái huà) over "classical chinese" (文言 wén yán). "Modern chinese" is the kind of chinese you read in cnovels and everywhere else nowadays.

And in this movement, they also advocated quite a lot of western ideas. This is where they proposed a complete romanisation of chinese characters, and probably to do with this, in their new modern chinese writings, they started using anglicised phrases like "City Y" and "Dog S".

All movements are controversial, their failure or success is controversial, I really don't want to get into past history so let's move on.

What they use now.

When journalling one's own experiences, important places and all that, obviously real places and names are used. Otherwise, in fiction, alphabetic initials are used in place, likely to 1. distance fiction from real life, and also I suppose nowadays 2. to avoid heated topics. For instance china may be referred to as 华国 (Huá guó), which probably makes things less sensitive and easier to handle.

again i really don't want to get into nations and stuff. let me literary-this meta out in peace.

How can I understand where means where?

It took me a while to get used to them, basically sometimes you can guess the place -- City B may be Beijing, C could be Chongqing, S could be Shanghai -- the big metropolitan cities. University T and P (or Q and B) would be Tsinghua and Peking University.

As for the other names, when they say University A or High School No. 1 it usually means the top school in the area, because (at least for high schools) that's how quite a number of schools are named. If you couldn't tell what the letter represents, it's probably a random one.

additional note: these initials are only used in modern and futuristic sci-fi novels (at least from what I've seen so far!) using letters in historical or historical fantasy ones would break the fourth wall quite a bit for me haha.

Addendum

See Guardian article linked in the comments should you be interested.

Some points of note, made up places have been used in other fiction too, to avoid trespassing geographical localities and cultures aboriginal to a group of people;

Russian novels also have used mysterious initials -- "in the town of P", this is in the 19th and 20th century -- so it may well have come from Russia instead of literature under greco-roman influence (excuse the terrible description) -- but likely it did result from the movements, that's what instigated modern chinese writing in the first place.

(yeah it's on my lack of russian classics perusal -- i'll rectify that some time.)

[cryptid-crafted]

oh lawd, the cryptid's craftin'

Hey-ho, writeblr! After some life upheaval and major goal/process restructuring, I'm back (if the profile picture looks familiar, you've got good eyes - I used to be @/goinggremlin).

The Basics:

Alex (he/they)

Late 20s, Midwest USA

Trans man, aroace, AuDHD

On Writing:

My genres: fantasy, horror, sci-fi, occasional contemporary fiction

My influences: Tamsyn Muir, Mark Lawrence, Joe Abercrombie, Robin Hobb, Martha Wells, Yasuhiro Nightow

My favorite themes/tropes/topics/etc: death and rebirth; found family and queerness; "this shit sucks but we stay silly"; body horror; characters with guard dog vibes; "it's rotten work" / "not to me. not if it's you"; banter and witty comedy, esp. as a juxtaposition to The Horrors; trauma and its cycles; shitty people doing shitty things; grumpy (with a heart of gold) x sunshine (with a soul black as night); 2nd person POV

About Me:

I am NOT a writer with any formal training - I'm self-taught, but always interested in learning.

I've been writing consistently for nearly seven years now. I started with fanfiction and over the last year and a half have begun transitioning to more original work.

I'm really bad at interacting consistently, as most of my limited energy goes toward writing. I love sharing resources and prompts, however, and will more often participate in ask games than tag games ❤️ Community is important but I'm most often found on the fringes.

I won't post large chunks of WIP often, because I am slow (but also like privacy during drafting). I will post fun snippets of dialogue or description because I crave validation and am unashamed about admitting that.

I love swapping tips and tricks, or just generally talking about the writing process!

You can also find me on my more fan-focused blog, @thechaoscryptid! I'm a firm believer that transformative work is a valid (even necessary) part of the creative world. You may (will) hear about some of my fanwork on this blog in the context of craft or process.

Published works:

Wintersong (Many Hands, Duck Prints Press, 2024)

It Watches (Cryptid Carols To Sing In the Dark, Memento Vivere Press, 2024 - upcoming)

WIPs:

in that bright and bitter dawn (fantasy novel)

Behind the Blog:

In addition to writing, you'll also hear about cooking and knitting and cat parenting, oh my! I've been passionate about food since I could pick up a knife; knitting is a recent but rewarding hobby I pick at when I need something to do with my hands.

I have three cats (Shino, Rorschach, and Chaos) and two snakes (Jormungandr and Oda).

I work third shift (at a book warehouse!) and am usually pretty brain/pain foggy, so if I space on an ask or tag game...it's not you, it's me.

I fandom hop SO much, largely around the anime scene (Trigun, Naruto, SK8: the Infinity, BNHA, Bungou Stray Dogs...so many more...). I'm also a huge BG3 and FE:3H enthusiast, even though video games aren't usually my go-to.

This year I've been plowing through a lot of fantasy and sci-fi books that I hope to be able to sit down and write down my thoughts about!

I'm also a huge music enthusiast, and listen to a lot of metal and folk music. Favorite bands include (but are definitely not limited to) Sabaton, Fish In A Birdcage, Autoheart, Faun, Delain, and Port Sulphur Band.

That's about it! My ask box is always open (my DMs are not, unless specifically invited please), and I'm looking forward to dipping my toes into the writeblr waters once again.