#tmwysl

[thequibblah]

currently rereading TMWYSL and holy first of all mystified is one of my fav fleetwood mac songs how did I never catch that!! also ahhhh its so cute that she recognizes the way james writes his y's

also ugh this line “It’s come — on,” she snaps, “only babies need to make their words smaller.” it just hits so hard that sisters share so much of themselves with each other even if they'd never want to and this line just cuts me to my core

THANK YOUUUUU hehehe

[practicecourts]

@thequibblah

I can’t stop thinking about this song when I look at your Slytherin Lily . Could also be why I felt more worried for her than thankfully was necessary 😌

[thequibblah]

kelsey!!!! thank you thank you MWAH ❤️❤️

As 2022 comes to an end, I wanted to share 22 fic recs from my reading list this year. Not all of these necessarily came out in 2022 (it was my first full year back in fandom, so I had a lot to catch up on!) 🥰

If you're tagged in this post (or even if you're not!) I'd love to see you post some of your 2022 recs!

ONESHOTS Prophecy by @alohaemora I Have Questions by @cascader foreigner's god by @clare-with-no-i chasing down the silver linings of wounded minds and wounded souls by darlingjustdont lingering days, short-lived nights by @thegobletofweasleysasleys The Light Come Shining by @nought-shall-go-ill we should just kiss like real people do by @theesteemedladydebourgh tell me where your secrets lie by @thequibblah

MULTICHAPTER Fragmented Foes* by @alittlebitofeverything23 theogony* by clarewithnoi Guarding the Gates* by @corinnesamuels Everlong by @emeralddoeadeer but he's a little bit too far away by @firefeufuego Shelf Awareness by @ghostofbambifanfiction some with arrows, some with traps by @isahorcrux Sunshine in My Eyes by monroeslittle even the bones will do* by @oneofthesirens Come Together* by thequibblah

SERIES The Last Enemy: The Howling Nights + TLE: Dark Marks* by @chdarling the way you left me/heart of glass by @possessingtheproperspirit Shout Out To My Ex + Sequels* by @wearingaberetinparis Jingle—Holy F*ck and The First Time Divorcees Club* by theesteemedladydebourgh

*notes a WIP

In full transparency I've read over 200 fics this year and there are SO MANY MORE fics I could add but I really wanted to stick to 22 for the ~vibes~. If you want more recs, drop a 📖 in my ask and I'll reply with another title! Happy New Year to you all!

[thequibblah]

any poetry recommendations? tmwysl had me reading chevrefoil & i loved it, so i’d love to hear anything else you’ve got!

i'm so sorry to have kept u waiting!!! first i will recommend helen vendler's "exploring a poem" from her book poems, poets, poetry as a way to start thinking about reading and digesting poetry, in case that is of interest

to steal from my college poetry class, we must of course begin w poetry to apollo...

"archaic torso of apollo," rainer maria rilke

"homeric hymn to apollo," trans. rodney merrill

"apollo," elizabeth alexander

"plaster cast torso of apollo," rainer maria rilke

and assorted faves of mine!

"we lived happily during the war," ilya kaminsky

"the glass essay," anne carson

"oulipo," brandon som

"modern love," john keats

"where does such tenderness come from?" marina tsvetaeva

"who shall deliver me?" christina rossetti

"o taste and see," denise levertov

"whoso list to hunt," thomas wyatt

"poplar street," chen chen

"some years there exists a wanting..." claudia rankine

"little dog's rhapsody in the night," mary oliver

"the crack," denise levertov

astrophil and stella sonnet 49, phillip sidney

""hope" is the thing with feathers," emily dickinson

"initiation," rainer maria rilke

"a woman speaks," audre lorde

"the feeling of needing a pen," patricia lockwood

thank you for asking, this was so fun <3

[thequibblah]

MWAH!!!!!

24 for the fanfic asks ^^

24. favorite fic you read this year

you picked a hard one!! this one is impossible for me to decide, so I'll have to pick a few...

somehow, I never read Careless Texter by @ghostofbambifanfiction until 2022, so I definitely have to mention that here, because it's AMAZING.

Homonyme by @clare-with-no-i, the best bleur ever (I keep mentioning Homonyme in all of these asks and I feel a bit bad for sounding like a broken record but !!!! I mean it!)

tell me where your secrets lie by @thequibblah (the best slytherin!lily you'll ever read with nuance and accurate characterization galore)

The First Time Divorcees Club by @theesteemedladydebourgh, which is SO FANTASTIC. p.s. read Jingle — Holy F*ck before you read this!

There are definitely more I'm forgetting, but these are just a few of my favorites this year.

[thequibblah]

TELL ME WHERE YOUR SECRETS LIE, a slytherin!lily AU—

She’s Lily Evans. She's Muggle-born. She's a witch. She's a Slytherin. You already know how this story goes.

READ | PLAYLIST

[thequibblah]

tag line game

thanks @wearingaberetinparis and @possessingtheproperspirit!

the game is to choose five of your fics and write them tag lines, then tag five people. truthfully i feel like i’ve already written tag lines for my fics in the summary or on my masterlist LOL but i had other people pick five so that i couldn’t make it too easy....... sort of

i am beginning to realise i’m easier at doing this when Not on my own, ah well 

tagging @sunshinemarauder @theesteemedladydebourgh @emeralddoeadeer @clare-with-no-i @oyprongs! 

put a bow on it — “Fucking interdepartmental memos.” because it always makes me laugh and why not go for something less obvious

if we never meet again — “By the time this ends, they’ll have to be at least a little in love" is my pick tbh but what if... “Can they wake up without falling in love?” bcs whms is “can two friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning?”

what we do in secret — “No one else knows, but no one else matters.”

tell me where your secrets lie — not going to lie i like “You already know this story” too much to pick anything else im sorry im sorry

walking with you in the sunshine — “SIKE JP” “Good thing they’re pretty good at waiting.”

[thequibblah]

She thinks of Potter’s arm across her shoulders; for someone made of sunlight, flimsy and golden and always out of reach, he is surprisingly solid. Surprisingly comforting. The sweep of his thumb over her cheekbone. The way he said it’s okay, and also I’m here, and also shh, like she’s not an uncontrollable spill but something that can be soothed. Like he can hold her like a handful of water, and she won’t slip through his fingers. Lily cries thinking of his cupped palm.

The pearl in her mouth hardens. She will need to cough it out soon, or choke.

dawg remember when you put your foot on my neck and refused to take it off for 40k words

fact check it’s 26k words where is your god now!

what line or passage from my fic do you remember me by?

[thequibblah]

WAIT WHAT?

I know it might seem like I’m being all waahhhhhh i love my bestie for no reason, but I seriously cannot stress to you all enough that I think about this passage from tell me where your secrets lie every single day:

“She thinks of Potter’s arm across her shoulders; for someone made of sunlight, flimsy and golden and always out of reach, he is surprisingly solid. Surprisingly comforting. The sweep of his thumb over her cheekbone. The way he said it’s okay, and also I’m here, and also shh, like she’s not an uncontrollable spill but something that can be soothed. Like he can hold her like a handful of water, and she won’t slip through his fingers. Lily cries thinking of his cupped palm.”

how? how does someone think of that. how. I genuinely am so overwhelmed by this prose. the fact that we’re all just witnessing her publish this all for free? my god

[thequibblah]

I have a doc with all my favorite lines of yours, but I don’t need a doc to remember these, these are forever in my mind:

They all exhaled her soft little laugh; they all thought his name, or perhaps murmured it, the whisper passing through the crowd like the wind amidst trees. Maybe they all loved him, or hers was enough for all of them. (MY FAV CHAPTER ON PLANET HEART)

He understands the impulse to freeze this moment in time. It catches in his throat, the happiness of it, and surely that delight would hold firm even to a photograph; it spills unbound in the air, curls like her hand against his jaw. (I can’t whit these two, I just can’t)

When term begins anew she will necessarily go back to being studious, hardworking, deadpan Lily. Always in control. For now let her practice; let her flex and curl into this made-up character a little while longer. Something new every day. (Tmwysl Lily speaks to my soul)

💕

[thequibblah]

fantastic news, slytherin lily au is at 8.9k and we are at the very beginning of fifth year, and most of the plot is 6th/7th year

excellent

[thequibblah]

happy to report 1. progress on slytherin!lily 2. title of slytherin!lily 3. playlist for slytherin!lily 

snippet below the cut, playlist here

In the moments before he remembers to be cold and impassive, he’s surprised. “Oh,” he says, “it’s you.”

Lily nods stiffly, staking out a spot on the far wall. “Supposed to supervise you or something. Just…carry on.”

“My condolences,” he mutters.

She’s pretty sure that his detention isn’t reading Animus Transformed cover to cover, but she says nothing. At the end of his hour, she sweeps the books back onto their shelves with one wave of her wand. Potter says nothing either, not even thank you. In Transfiguration the next week, this harmless little secret sits between them like a pearl growing within the lips of an oyster. Lily can taste it in the back of her throat, feel it grow glossy and smooth, feel it gain weight and shine. 

By November, they are murmuring almost-polite hellos to each other at the beginning of class.

[thequibblah]

accepting bets for how long this oneshot will turn out to be

[thequibblah]

usually i bemoan slytherin!aus but you are a genius and i will read anything you write! very excited for it to come out 💚x

hah thank you! i don't find house AUs to be that exciting either tbh (wow way to sell the fic, suze)

but i will tell you guys this upfront (which i'm also saying in the fic notes): this is not what if lily were a different person who is in slytherin because she's cunning/ambitious/whatever ... because i don't particularly care about that. like, to me that's an oc, that's not lily. i'm not gonna edgy-ify my sweet sweet girl just for the sake of it kjdhgjkd

the fic IS what if lily asked to be put in slytherin so she is the same eleven year old, and then has a vastly different hogwarts experience! but of course the more things change the more they stay the same etc which i had a ton of fun playing with.

[thequibblah]

Why is your writing so addictive ? And is there a support group you know of 😜 Lily in Slytherin was less dark than I expected but again your writing made me reading at an unhealthy speed (good thing I won’t get a ticket for that) while I had to actually work today.

Your last bit had me very worried about them being cornered in the Dungeons by the Mulciber cronies and I am just very glad it only (!) led up to the pre- proposal .

Would love to read some S Lily -Black interactions (I feel she could have connected to Regulus ;)

But anyway, support I will need for I must stop thinking about these two and actually sleep some. Thank you for another great read.

hope you got some rest HAHAAA and tysm for the kind words! glad to have worried you... a bit >:) i believe the support group is simply The Internet, please don’t bill me for damages xx

i know you didn't explicitly ask why lily isn't edgier in this au but you did get me thinking about how to articulate my feelings on the subject, so i hope you don't mind if i jump on that opportunity.

not making her "dark" was a conscious choice. i didn't really realise until i started to think about it, but while fleshing out this idea i decided i don't really care about that kind of storytelling. i don't think darkness equals moral flexibility equals interesting, and i don't think that's the only aspect of slytherin!lily worth highlighting. i envision canon wartime lily as having her own shades of grey for sure, and to me it doesn't add anything to have an alternate version of her be...well, for lack of a better descriptor, edgy!

in this au she's a scared kid and sure she's going to act tougher than she really is because of the circumstances. but...said circumstances, both within hogwarts and in the outside world, are so stacked against her even in canon, i feel quite opposed to drawing out that toughness. the world already demands invulnerability of her. why would the façade be the most interesting thing about her? rather than "what is she perceived as," can the question be "who does she see herself as," and following that, "who does she want to be"? this is why i wanted to be so, so, so deep in her pov for this fic — it’s so centred around her, her narrative concerns, it borders on solipsistic. and the side effect is that unless someone tells her, explicitly, the reader just does not know what other people think of her! because that’s not what i was interested in!

i feel like in the era of prestige tv drama we maybe place more emphasis than we need to on moral greyness as depth or nuance while also assuming it belongs only to ~dark~ characters! there are plenty of those characters in the hpverse already, and i find it honestly unproductive, personally, to look at other characters through that same lens. as much as fic is creative, i like to approach it critically as well — i am interested in engaging with the text, obviously to various degrees depending on the seriousness of the story, but with every fic i need to ask why these characters, why this friendship, why this setting, and if the answer doesn’t go beyond just because then i am just not here for it.

i'm consistently more interested in the conscious desire to be good, what it means and what shape it takes, and in optimism more than cynicism. i'm sure there are people who can and do weave that into "dark" plotlines, but it's just not for me!

[thequibblah]

7, 15, 28, 30?

7. Any worldbuilding you’re particularly proud of?

haha. well i'm so glad you asked :~)

because i was rereading it yesterday, i'll say the quirks of hogwarts in tell me where your secrets lie were really fun. at first i just wanted to give lily a cool head girl dorm because i have stubbornly held on to solo dorm rooms for heads for a long time (malory towers taught me a lot guys), but i was also like, why not actually get some cool perks with it? the common rooms are all distinct according to location, why wouldn't the head dorms be? i loved the idea that the castle has a sort of mind/will of its own and i really wish i'd put similar quirks in come together, ha. all lily and james get there is a fkn window seat :/

15. What’s your favorite AU that you’ve written?

ok i would probably say any of my regency AUs here, because they are so utterly indulgent, but i will instead say unbelievers. i've wanted to write a real curse breakers AU since even just to reach is a triumph, where they are training to be curse breakers but uh . don't do a lot of that in the fic. i liked how it lined up with my conception of james and lily enough to want to explore it further, and i'm really proud of how it turned out!

28. Does anyone read your fics before you post them? If so, who?

nope! i sometimes send bits to friends but i don't use a beta (though in principle i approve of the concept and i think it makes your writing a lot stronger — i used to have a few!) mostly because i hardly have enough time to be writing as it is, it would just be worse if i had to add another step to the process.

30. Have you ever written something that was out of your comfort zone? If so, what was it, and how did it affect your approach to writing fic thereafter?

at risk of giving the same answer to every question, ha, tell me where your secrets lie was definitely a challenge because of the subject matter — i'd never written a house AU before and i had very strong feelings on how i wanted it to go (and even stronger feelings on how i didn't want it to go). i think being so immersed in the pov was definitely what the story demanded and what makes me so happy with it, but also it's been hard to go back to a plottier style of writing that i need/prefer for longer, multi-POV fics! on the positive side, though, i think i've let myself be more lyrical and slip deeper into emotions when the scene demands it since then.

ask me these!