lintamande replied to your post: lintamande said: feel better soon! Can I request…

When the world remakes itself, the Haradric tribes tell different stories. Those who fought most directly against Sauron do not believe he has died with the wave. Some even claim he caused it, that he convinced the Numenoreans to take him to the island so he could destroy it and rid himself forever of his enemies. The seafaring tribes have other stories; the sea itself, so incensed by the evil coming from Numenor, pulled the island under, so to save the world from the plundering ships of the great fleet of Pharazon. Some say that the island sank because the land-spirit of Numenor (the Mother of the Numenorean peoples, as the Desert is Mother of the tribes) was poisoned and died by Sauron’s evil influence, or that God, pitying her misery, swept up both island and spirit beyond the knowledge of the world.

But the strangest story is told by a tribe of horsemen who live in the far eastern mountains. As the shadows began to darken over the water, they tell of the great flocks of birds that fled to Harad, flying farther than any birds should ever go, making the long voyage that no small sparrow or kirinki could possibly ever make without rest, and continuing on through the hot desert into the cool shelter of the mountains on a mysterious wind that blew off the sea. And each bird, they said, was a Numenorean soul, for as the island released her fair birds into flight, she transformed her people left on the island by Ar-Pharazon’s golden fleet, and sent them over the sea. They welcomed the birds as they would refugees, allowing them to settle in their cities. To this day the horsemen will sometimes tell of long cool nights, when the drums beat and the music is like the music that made the world, that sometimes the birds fly out of the trees and hills and take the shapes of men and women with gray eyes and pale faces, and dance with them before disappearing with the rising sun.

A subject of frenzied but unanswered debate questions the origin of the scarlet feathers the horsemen sometimes carry for good luck on long journeys, but no Gondorian has ever been to the far mountains to document whether they do, indeed, harbor the last kirinki among their cities, so impossibly distant that they are thought by Umbarean traders to be no more than a mere myth.

This post now is the origin of a published poem, “The Woman Sings Her Marriage Into Being” ! Thanks so much lintamande for giving me the seed of inspiration with this prompt ages ago!

So I commissioned theloserfish to draw Captain Rivka in one of those typical movie-poster pose where the guy is brandishing his weapon looking all tough and the female lead is draped around his feet, but somehow Shulamit and Aviva turned into the best part of the picture because Ladies Kissing.

Anyway, according to local rumor, on Yom Kippur when Rivka goes to the temple to atone, the temple atones instead. And on Passover, she would have needed only one plague — herself!

Book links: The Second Mango, Climbing the Date Palm, and A Harvest of Ripe Figs. Short stories here. Both couples are canon, so if you like girls with girls and warrior women with wizards, come on in; we’d love to have you.

can we talk about Isaac’s face though? Isaac’s face is perf.

He knows what’s up ;)

My friends interested in queer fantasy and Jewish fantasy alike should check out shiraglassman ! Maybe of special interest to an-animal-imagined-by-poe anghraine scienceweasels sniperct gloriousmonsters !

“Data on people who start pain treatment yields the same conclusion: The vast majority don’t misuse their drugs.”

I live in fear of this.  I have just started to get treatment for my pain.  I am terrified of the day that I am told I don’t get to have relief anymore.  This past month, I was told I couldn’t refill my prescription until almost a week later because the federal government limits how many pills a month any given pharmacy can dispense.  And I can’t take my prescription to different pharmacies because that can look suspicious.  I was lucky that I hoard pills and sometimes cut them in half instead of taking a full dose because it meant I had enough until my script was able to be filled.  

Right now, my husband is in agony all the time because he has two pain pills that last a sum of 6 hours total to get through days with multiple dislocations of his hip.  But he can’t call the doctor to ask for more pills – that’s pill seeking.  He can’t make a new appointment to get re-evaluated for the pain that’s emerged – that’s pill seeking.  He can’t get his prescriptions phoned in to the pharmacy without an appointment – that’s pill seeking.  He can’t go to the ER to get the hip treated because they will give him pain pills – that’s pill seeking.  Either of us can be dropped from pain treatment if we go to the ER and are administered pain treatment that is done explicitly done by our pain specialists.  That’s part of our contract to agree to be treated.  So if I was in a car accident tomorrow and had to get pain medicine for surgery after care, I could find myself without any pain treatment afterwards because I violated the agreement of my pain clinic.  

I can’t make this shit up.  It is utterly bizarre and it penalises people like me and my husband for having the gall to be young and diagnosed with a crippling, agonizing genetic condition.  Every month, we pay for urine tests, doctor’s appointments, and our prescriptions.  Every month.  Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we don’t get urine screened because our number doesn’t randomly come up.  At my doctor, that’s $75 a go.  That’s more than we spend on a week of groceries, for comparison.  And I’m willing to bet that if chronic pain patients do end up buying prescription pain killers from the black market, it’s because we make it almost impossible for people on fixed incomes to afford and obtain them legally.

Cannot repeat this enough: the way we do narcotic medications unfairly targets poor, disabled people and penalizes them for suffering. I’m chronically undermedicated because to ask for the correct amount of meds could be seen as “pill-seeking” -- if I ask for too many at once, too big of an increase, it will be presumed I am selling them or taking them for shits and giggles. For 3 months I have increased my dose gradually, slowly, because if I said “well, actually, 1 pill a day isn’t enough -- 3, or even 4, would be ideal” I’d be told no. Nope, that’s too many. So instead we went from 1 to 1.5, to 2, and now I’m going to ask for 3.5. (3.5 still isn’t quite enough but it’s almost enough -- maybe in September or October I’ll get 4 pills a day. That’s 16 hours of coverage, for what it’s worth. That’s not even enough pills to relieve my pain without gaps where the medication has worn off.)

Even though from month to month my health has changed ... a lot. My pain has increased dramatically because I have new dislocations, a side-effect of a round of physical therapy that did more harm than good because the therapists didn’t understand my condition. But I can’t go to the ER and say “I can barely walk please help” -- because I have a script and I can’t get additional meds from an outside source or I’m pill-seeking. I can’t schedule a sooner appointment even though I had a major dislocation last weekend that was so painful I couldn’t stop crying and I still don’t feel quite right --  because going too often is a sign I’m using my medication irresponsibly and might need to be taken off them entirely.

I don’t want the sun and the moon. I want my pain to be less than 8.5 more than 6 hours a day. I don’t want no pain (pain meds don’t do that). I want my pain to be around a 6 or a 7, in which I am uncomfortable constantly, but I can function enough to wash my own goddamn hair or feed myself or buy groceries. When my pain is higher than an 8 I can’t go down the stairs. I can barely eat, let alone cook food. If I had enough medication for an entire day I might be able to do some part-time work sitting at home; but unmedicated, I have trouble walking to the bathroom, and no intellectual or emotional energy for research or writing.

My pain is never going away. It’s a thing you have to accept with Ehlers-Danlos; some lifestyle changes can help decrease the frequency of the pain or the intensity, but it’s never going to get better -- in fact, your trajectory is more pain, in more areas, until you die. That sucks, but that’s life, and part of your self-care with a degenerative illness is figuring out how to thrive emotionally as your physical ability decreases (for me: lots and lots of poetry, finding friends who understand, cherishing and prioritizing the parts of my life that work and that I still enjoy, like eating and everything surrounding food, a lot of adjustment of my expectations.) Why do doctors make this even harder by acting like my desire to live with decreased pain is outrageous, suspicious, a sign of moral degeneracy? 

Most people go to the hospital at 8.5 pain -- if 9 is breaking a bone (10 is “the worst pain you’ve ever been in” which, for me, was literally believing I was actively dying from the pain in my head and my racing heart after a wacked out hallucinatory reaction to the migraine medication Imitrex), 8.5 is like when you twisted your knee and it won’t support your weight, or wrench your arm so bad you can’t use it and it won’t hold anything. That’s every day for me. Every day I struggle to do basic tasks -- I can’t even tell you the last time I stood in the bathtub to take a shower, I have to sit to bathe myself -- but if I ask for the medication that makes it possible for me to take care of myself, leave the house, have a life, I’m pill-seeking.

The war on drugs tries, deliberately, to kill people who are expensive to treat. I’m expensive to treat, though opiates are cheap to manufacture and it doesn’t cost much for me to take them. Opiates literally save pain patients’ lives -- after all, when your body is the problem, getting rid of your body looks like a reasonable option. And when you’ve treated chronic pain adequately, possibly life-threatening conditions are easier to notice, identify, and treat. Non-opiate options like medicated creams or patches, which are hard to abuse, come with massive price tags (lidocaine patches, which you apply directly to an area of pain, are $300 for a half-month box at retail value, and insurance companies won’t pay for them unless you have shingles) which leave low-income chronic pain patients with one option: cheap narcotics. Which we’re supposed to feel like bad people for needing. And which are hard to get.

It’s an unjust, unfair system, and we need, so badly, for this “war on drugs” bullshit to stop targeting important prescription medications and start looking at the real cause of drug abuse: the unjust, unfair system in America which drives people to self-medicate with street drugs to deal with the fact that even middle-class kids have no future of prosperity or well-being to look forward to, and there’s no sign of that changing.

people: filled with sin dirt: filled with worms (a good and righteous thing)

#this post seems like catholic peasant shitposting from the year 1100  (via shellbeaste)

follow for more soft twelfth century catholicism 

Hi Tumblr. Please signal boost!

Wondering why I haven’t been around? Disability stuff, some computer functionality, and the big one…

We’re extremely broke and it’s taken all of my spoons to feed us for the past couple of months, but hobbitballerina and I are about to be completely out of money with nothing to live on until September when student loans disburse.

I wrote about it on my writer’s blog. The short version: after my wife fell last year, the medical bills ate away what little we had to live on right now. Our options are find some help, or accept we will be paying off the 25% interest on $5000 in credit card debt for God knows how long.

We’ve started a GoFundMe. If you have anything at all, please throw it our way. If you’re more comfortable paypaling us, send a private message and I will send you our paypal accounts.

I’m also writing short poetry and flash fic again. Any topic of your choice, approximately 500 words for $15. Pop a message in my tumblr inbox and we can discuss what story or poem I can write for you! If you’ve ever wanted meticulously researched Jonathan Strange/Grant or Arabella/Emma Pole slash fic or Umbarean Librarians Save The Day fic, or anything else that strikes you, please consider throwing me a little money to write it for you. I will also edit your work – please message me and let’s talk about what you can afford and what I can do.

Tumblr people, though I haven’t posted much in the past couple of months, you all have been amazing, wonderful human beings who have seen me through some hard troubles. The generosity and kindness of tumblrfolk has always amazed me, and I am honored to count many of you as dear friends. Please reblog. Please give or commission if you can. We need lots of hugs and encouragement right now, and hobbitballerina and I always welcome cut fuzzy de-stressing animals.

Thank you.

So this is the long and short of what’s been happening with me and Lev lately.  We’re really struggling and it’s harder than either of us had ever imagined it would be.  I know a few people had reached out to see about helping, and we’ve finally worked out how that can be done.  This is not a thing I’m proud of.  I’ve spent my whole life trying to keep my head above water and take responsibility for myself.  But I can’t keep swimming.  Neither of us can.  And admitting it is incredibly, phenomenally, overwhelmingly hard.

I’m also willing to edit academic papers for people.  If it’s in math/science, I can only give general grammar/style/usage copyedits.  For humanities folks, especially in history and religion, I can work on content.  I’ve been published in volumes from Oxford University Press, and I’ve published in peer-reviewed journals.  I know my commas from my semicolons.  Message me, and I’m happy to work something out.

Wow, guys. I am going to bed on the first night and all you wonderful, amazing people have given us nearly $500, almost half what we need for next month’s rent. Please keep reblogging. It’s hard to explain how much this means to us. I keep seeing your names come up in my email and bursting into happy tears.

Thank you. <3 I love you all. I will reply to messages in my inbox tomorrow.

I am so (so so so) excited to share that my novel Otherbound just won the Bisexual Book Award in the Speculative Fiction category!

In celebration, here’s an impromptu giveaway—reblog this post by Saturday (June 6) noon EST, and I’ll enter you in a drawing for a brand-new hardcover. Open to any country Book Depository will ship to.

Otherbound is about a boy from our world who’s spent ten years involuntarily witnessing the life of a servant girl from another world every time he blinks—and what happens when they finally learn to communicate. 

See my website for details about the book, including a longer description, reviews, and buy links.

Thanks for celebrating with me! <3

this is the money dog, repost in the next 24 hours and money will come your way!!

ehh what the hell

OH MY GOD SO NO FUCKIN BULLSHIT I SWEAR To GOD. I reblogged this an hour ago and IM NOT Lying My Tax Refund which I did in late march popped into my Bank Account, and it was a Decent sized amount……

WHAT THE FUCK Is THIS MAGIC!??!?!?! Im trying this again IM NOT BSing hahahaha thats actually pretty cool xD

yooooo

yoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

FUCKIN YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

no BULLSHIT I KID YOU NOT! Look what I found while walking Home…..

OH MY GOD

OH MY F*CKIN GOD

THIS POST FUCKIN WORKS?!?!?! THIS IS PAST A COINCIDENCE NO WAY!??! NO FRIGGIN WAY!!! 

Im Going to reblog this every day to test this, its MAGIC ITS FRIGGIN MAGIC 

I need to believe in the heart of the post…

Oh? Well… *reblag*

I don’t usually believe in these posts but I reblogged this yesterday and look what I found under my door today:

Really fun tattoo commission for oracleofanon. I’m especially pleased with how that dragon turned out!

As usual, please don’t repost, don’t remove credit or text, and please don’t tattoo someone else’s design on yourself!

I wish there was more gyms specifically for disabled people. Like a heated lap pool and wheelchair accessible equipment. Maybe your insurance can help with the fees. Idk is this a thing? It should be. I’m sure it is a thing. There just needs to be more of it.

And with hand cycles! And raised platforms with mats that are easier to use than getting on the ground! There was an accessible pool at my college and it was great.

I went to a physical therapist with a professional gym attached to the practice, and their gym coaches had training as PT people too. Actually several therapy offices I’ve been at have included accessible gym equipment and you could subscribe to basically a gym membership version of physical therapy to use their stuff, and in theory some insurances paid for it.

If you’re a queer-identified person who does some non-fandom creative writing, heads up on these open calls specifically soliciting queer folks! Some calls are also looking for writers from other marginalized communities, including PoC, English second-language speakers, and disabled writers.

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Reminder this is your last day for Queers Destroy Science Fiction! If you are on the fence just send it in before midnight! Also send poems to Stone Telling!