@n1ghtcrwler / n1ghtcrwler.tumblr.com
I have a website where I compile all my projects! Want to find me on other social media sites? Check out Tall Tales? Keep up with my fanfic or the young audiences stories I write under a psuedonym? Check out my gaming livestreams? Everything public I'm working on is available on or through my website! I encourage you to click through the above link and poke around a bit!
Title: The Bones We Haunt.
Genre: Historical Fiction, Gothic horror, romance, novella.
Status: First Draft + development.
Synopsis:
November, 1905.
While on holiday in Cambridge and attending museum lectures with her mother, Jane Sterling seeks to make this her chance to officially pursue her love of paleontology. While her family encourages the pursuit of passions and challenging rigid social norms, the institutes in place hinder her passion, making her resort to dressing brightly and speaking loudly for attention.
Jane's chance comes to reveal itself in the form of the wealthy and reclusive Sir Terence Hayes, who’s come in search for her father, the esteemed paleobotonist Dr. Samson Sterling, to appraise fossils found in his garden. Her mother eagerly volunteers Jane to go in Dr. Sterling’s place as he remains ill in America, and Terence brings her to his isolated family's estate in the vast, deep, muddy marshes of Wolf’s Run. And the land is shrouded in urban legends. There are whispers of 'The Wolf's Run Beast,' the 'Monster of the Marshes,' that haunts the land under the cover of night, and as Terence leaves Jane to her work he is hell-bent that she's to return to Cambridge before nightfall.
However, freak storms rage, causing the marshes' waters to rise and wash out the roads in flash floods before Jane has a chance to return, leaving her stranded at Wolf’s Run - and at the mercy of all that lurks there.
As night looms, the staff hastily depart, an eerie silence falls, Terence forbids her from even coming near the cellar, and, most importantly, he warns her against leaving her room before dawn. All is merely a strange act to Jane, brushing it off as the eccentricities of an Englishman, until something comes scratching at her door, hungering for her blood.
What started as a mere chance at becoming known swiftly becomes a tumultuous game of blood, teeth, survival, love, and salvation - and Jane must prepare to sharpen teeth of her own if she's to survive the horrors of the Wolf's Run marshes.
surprise surprise, another WIP inspired by Jojo's need to turn every DILF she falls in love with into a love interest in a monster romance-adjacent book! 🥰 This one's victim??? Ciaran Hinds as a brooding but sweet capital 'r' Romantic were-beast/werewolf-ish creature. 😍 The vibes for this WIP are, like... 90s gothic period drama.... bluebeard meets 'mexican gothic' meets company of the wolves meets 'the death of jane lawrence'... and i've only known this WIP for 3 days and I'm already obsessed, help-
The zombie campaign
Reintroducing myself over on YouTube! I'm not really a newbie because I've been posting videos since last July but I saw this and wanted to jump in on it.
My salmon bag I finished last night, wanted to make something for myself for once. This is what I came up with.
Enjoy!
Thanks to @words-after-midnight for the tag!
📝 Make a poll with two truths and one lie about a WIP or character, and have people select which option they think is the lie. The specifics are up to you.
This is for Brett from November Breaks and Spin Cylinder...
The answer is under the cut because we all know I'm not going to remember to come and update this after the poll is over.
Tagging @tailoroffates, @talesfromaurea, @talesofsorrowandofruin and @theeccentricraven if you'd like to do it, with an open tag for anyone else who wants to join in 💙
Reblogs, replies etc on my tag posts are always welcome, but if you're doing this tag yourself, please make your own post instead of using mine to start a reblog chain.
I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.
Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.
Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!
Thanks for the tag @illarian-rambling!
This is Ellis from Pride and Prejudice in Space.
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“Good job I like being tied up,” he said flirtatiously. It was one thing to let Pan see a hint of vulnerability from him, but he didn’t like the idea of this man, Alliance or ex-Alliance or whatever he was, seeing beneath his skin.
“I suppose that might explain some of your life choices,” Theo said dryly. “Sit up,” he demanded, turning towards a draw and riffling through it.
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Tagging @poethill, @n1ghtcrwler and @cssnder and anyone else who is keen!
On how to prep as a GM/DM
we kept the same landline phone all throughout my childhood, and even though i have no use for it, I can still recite it. but i was wondering how common that is
there is something so sacred about being a loser
“That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king […] He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.”
— G. K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy
Thanks @jackiezenauthor for the tag!
On a bit of a The Second Coming run so I'll use that for this.
The first chapter? Haha so this is probably the 4th or 5th time we've re-written/re-done this story. The first version was about 120 hand written pages long, spewed out over a few weeks in high school. We then re-wrote the whole thing, it wound up being 150k+ words so we decided to turn it into a trilogy, and that's where we're at. But we very much started at the beginning, with chapter
2. If your story was a TV show, what would the theme song/intro be?
Bleeding out by Imagine Dragons. ID is pretty much the soundtrack for this story, and was the main music we listened to while we wrote it and so they're always indelibly tied together in my mind. But this song sort of sums up the vibe really well to me.
3. Who are your favorite characters you've made? Why?
Belial is definitely a fan favourite for us. He was never really meant to be a main character - he was a side character! He was just an NPC! But somehow he ended up becoming vital to the story and then the next thing you know he's a POV character. Belial is such a great character because he's so complex. He's a good person! Kind of! But he isn't afraid to do what needs to be done and if that means doing things that aren't so savoury, he's willing to do that. He's loyal to those he thinks are deserving, he's brave when he thinks it'll make a difference. He's also extremely hot.
4. What other pieces of media do you think would share a fanbase for your story?
Hmmm interesting. I mean, I don't love the comparison but fans of Cassandra Clare would probably enjoy TSC because it does have similar feels and themes. Potentially also Laini Taylor? Anyone who likes modern fantasy? Maybe Good Omens fans too, though we're not nearly as funny haha.
5. What has been your biggest struggle while writing?
Oh my god the editing. Honestly we are in editing hell right now and it's just excruciating. It's so disheartening to have to throw big chunks of writing in the bin and have to write the scene again because it wasn't quite right.
6. Are there any animals in your story? Talk about them!
There aren't really, which is kinda weird because we're both huge animal lovers.
7. How do your characters get around?(ex: trains, horses, cars, dragons, etc.)
Mostly in Merry's beat up old Kia.
8. What part of your wip are you working on?
Currently doing editing/rewrites on Anarchy, book two of the trilogy, a rough draft of which we spat out during a writing holiday back in 2020 and haven't had time to get back to.
9. What aspects (tropes, maybe?) of your wip do you think will draw people in?
We definitely have a couple of good ships, lots of action and great fight scenes, but I think (hope?) the characters are what people will enjoy. We want people to love our characters, to want to know more about them, to spend more time with them.
10. What are your hopes for your wip?
Honestly, publication with this one! We really think it has the chops to go the distance, we just need to find someone willing to take a chance on us. Or, for our podcast to get popular enough that we have a chance to self pub. Whatever works!
Tagging @illarian-rambling @cssnder and @xenascribbles
The first time I saw her, she was sitting on the wharf, her legs crossed under her, a book propped open on her lap. She was wearing a knitted cap over her long, thick black hair, and a chunky cream scarf was wound around her neck against the cold air. I wondered how long she’d been sitting there. It seemed too cold to be reading outside. It was a strange place to sit and read. There was no beauty in the spot today. Low, grey clouds hung over the choppy, cold water, and every now and then a few icy spits of rain came splattering down. It was a damp, unpleasant sort of day, the sort of day you only ever got in the British isles. A grey sky over a grey sea, a landscape permeated by grey. I stood and watched her for a while, curious. She only moved to turn the page, flipping it over with small, delicate fingers. After a while, I shook my head and walked on, leaving her to her strange pursuits.
The next time I saw her was a watercolour day, a brief respite from the rain. A watery sun threw its warmthless light over the soaked green fields. The sky was washed out, as if all the colour had been wrung out with the rain. She was still wearing the knitted cap, but she’d traded the scarf for a battered looking hoodie. She wasn’t reading this time, just looking out over the water, a vivid slash of colour in the otherwise pale day. I was in a hurry, and didn’t linger.
The next time I saw her, curiosity got the better of me. She was lying on her stomach on the end of the wharf, heedless of the damp that must have been soaking through her clothes. Her hands were held out over the salty waves, and I had the perverse impression that she was trying to summon some creature of the deep, some malevolent water spirit to wreak revenge on her enemies. It was a fanciful notion, but something about the intense set of her features unsettled me.
“What are you doing?” I asked as I approached her. She showed no sign of surprise at my voice, as if she had expected me to speak to her. Perhaps she’d just heard my footsteps on the boards. She stretched downwards, leaning even further over the edge of the wharf until her fingertips could brush the surface of the water, as if I supplication. I resisted the urge to grab her by the back of her shirt and pull her away from the edge, lest she fall in.
“Waiting for him to come back to me.” She said as if it were the most normal thing in the world. I considered that for a moment. It would be logical to assume she meant someone on a ship – a father or brother or lover? Sailed away to fish, or fight, or travel? And yet somehow, with the way she peered so intently into the depths, I had the odd feeling that wasn’t it.
“Who?” I asked. She didn’t look up, her long dark hair nearly touching the water as she exhaled, stroking the water again.
“Oh, he doesn’t have a name. But he’ll be here, soon.” She said, and then she did turn to me, a wide smile curving her mouth, “Soon.” She repeated. Something about her expression filled me with a sharp, nervous jolt, and I found myself turning and walking away before I even knew what I was doing. I was unsettled to my very core with no idea why.
According to the newspapers, the girl – her name was Emily Rosscore – disappeared that night. No one ever saw or heard from her again. I never told anyone of the conversation I’d had with her. I was only half convinced I hadn’t imagined it. The official line was that she’d fallen in the ocean and drowned, but for some reason, I could never quite bring myself to believe it. I hoped whoever she’d been waiting for had come back for her, and swept her away from this humdrum world.
I'm gonna be contrarian here for a minute and rant about "cats aren't even good pest control."
Which, one study that found cats don't do well against rats is not the be all end all of reality. A cat may not go after Norway rats, which are large and aggressive, no. An adult male wild Norway rat is large enough to give almost any cat a run for its money.
But Norway rats aren't the only thing that exist and get into houses and barns. It is very cold where I live, and while I see mice and packrats and voles, I have never once seen a wild RAT. Wild RATS don't get into my garage. Deer mice do. Bushy tailed pack rats do.
And you know what fixed it?
My cat. He's not even an outdoor cat. He's 100% indoors, or in the garage but only with the door closed so he can't leave.
He single handedly removed my packrat problem. I didn't need to resort to poisons and while I did set traps, none of them had even half of his success rate. Cats were domesticated primarily because of how good they are at catching small rodents. Their success knocked other animals such as trained ferrets off the popular spot for the task. Claiming a cat is useless as pest control is just plain not true.
Cats are decent pest control WITHIN CERTAIN PARAMETERS. They're good for certain types of small pest, and cats need ro be CONTAINED. Much like poisons, you can't just throw cats around willy nilly because they'll kill a shitload of non target animals.
A barn or shop cat is a good option for long term mouse control *if* it is actually confined to that barn or shop and not free to just leave. A semi feral cat that lives in a large warehouse and is vaccinated and desexed and vetted and kills whatever tiny pests get in to chew on stuff is the best case scenario for an adopted feral.
What I do NOT get however, is the insistence that terriers are better and you should just get one of those.
A dog is not an easy animal to keep and nor is it one you should go purchase because you want long term pest control in your barn. If you want a pest control solution call an externinator. If you want a dog that's intelligent and driven and needs dedicated training and care and you're happy to put in the energy to actually focus its chaotic energy into something useful then go get a ratting terrier.
These little dogs do not fill the same niche as a barn cat and their care is quite a bit more intense in general especially if the dog is going to be a house pet as well as a worker. They're intense and destructive and can and will pick fights, often fatal fights, with other animals. Stop telling people to go get one when all they need is to get some squirrels out of a shed. Buying a dog and buying pest control are not the same thing.
You could *hire* a ratter to do a sweep, but unless you're also removing the conditions that made your property popular with rats to begin with you're going to have to keep bringing them back.
The kind of people who leave feral cats outside to roam and breed freely are the last fucking people who have any business keeping a working line terrier.
I know i reblogged this earlier but yeah people are thinking "cat for pest control = outdoor cat" but the species cats are meant to control...usually cause problems because they're Inside
modern sealed-up houses don't often have mice and rats but that's a pretty new thing
People have been throwing their cats outside for a really long time of course, but the pests they control are in human buildings
oh yeah also the one meme talking about a terrier that killed thousands of rats in a short period of time
there was a blood sport called rat-baiting where a ratting dog was set upon a swarm of rats and people made bets about how many the dog could kill. so that's probably the context if I had to guess
Not exactly an indicator of a "better" pest control animal
Milo McKenzie, an unassuming sex therapist living on the outskirts of London, has been selected to sub for a notorious dom, Octavius Sinclair. But when their first scene is rudely interrupted by a sniper, it becomes rapidly apparent that Octavius is not just a flamboyant walking cliché of a supervillain in a pin-striped suit, but a major kingpin in the city's underworld of organized crime. No matter how hot this guy is (and he is hot), it's a hard no from Milo. But when a Scotland Yard detective offers to whisk Milo's mentally ill sister away from the overworked and understaffed NHS facility to a state-of-the-art private hospital, he can't turn them down. He agrees to continue seeing Octavius and report back about anything and everything he learns about "the enterprise" - the only name the triad of crime families seems to go by, when they're spoken of at all. Despite Octavius's mob ties and clinically diagnosable lack of empathy, Milo finds himself more and more taken by the man the longer they play together. It doesn't help that Octavius seems to feel the same way about his brand-new toy. But as the detective's demands become more pointed and Octavius gets drawn closer and closer into a trap, Milo has to decide whether his loyalty lies with the only family he's got left or a professional criminal he might be in love with. And that choice is gonna hurt way more than any lash of Octavius's whip.
This is, at least for now, being written in script format. Ask me how fun I am finding that. Spoiler alert: it is a lot.
My friends, let me know if you want to be on it!
My biggest frustration with the left has always been the inability/unwillingness to work on making progress inside of the system while advocating for greater change.
I remember the first time I came to this realization.
I was nineteen, pregnant. We couldn’t afford to heat the house because we couldn’t afford the deposit to turn the gas on. It was miserably cold. The duplex we were renting was old and rickety and drafty. The window frames were messed up and there were cracks you could stick your finger through that were open to the elements.
Just, like, to give you an idea where we were financially. And this was better than we’d been doing before!
Anyway, I had recently started going to DSA meetings. And that month, they were talking about how a moderate democrat had successfully gotten a small increase in WIC benefits monthly. It came out to, like, $10 a month.
The members talking—mostly male, almost all doing decent—were scornful. The democrat should have pushed harder and gotten more, refused to accept anything until everyone else caved to their demands. I remember sitting there, quietly drinking the latte in the smallest size they had that I had bought with scrounged quarters, listening. Wishing it wasn’t held in an indie coffee shop because it was a luxury I really couldn’t afford, but it would be rude not to. Enjoying the coffee anyway.
I was one of the lucky ones who was getting that additional $10 a month through WIC. Even more exciting, we were now getting a voucher for the farmers’ market. I casually mentioned that WIC recipients would now be getting farmers’ market vouchers, too.
The guy who organized the meetings was a hard worker, passionate guy. Did something in tech.
He was like, “That’s the thing! These people don’t want farmers market vouchers. They want—” and he went on to describe a bunch of pie in the sky desires. That, yeah, sounded good.
But one. I was one of those people! A lot if the tamiles were super excited about it, myself included.
I had never been to a farmers’ market before. I tried arugula for the first time, a piece pulled from a bunch by the grower as he explained the flavor difference. I hadn’t known before then that different lettuce greens had different flavors, that it was more than just the texture and shape. I tried pesto, which delighted me. Goat cheese. I got three full pounds of strawberries for two dollars, since they were closing soon and the old man selling the berries got a kick out of me.
Anyway. It was like, you have a decent life. Not great but decent! The things that are life changing for me, for us… you already have.
The ten dollars at the grocery store made the difference between a meal of broken-noodles-with-some-half-horrible-pantry-scraps and a meal. It kept me full and healthy! And the additional farmers’ market voucher was world changing for me.
The democrat who worked for those things barely got them through. And it was means tested to hell and back. They weren’t able to get everything they wanted. But what they got made such a huge difference for me, for people like me.
ok writeblr i have a question and it does not matter if you answer re fanfic or original work:
do you nerds know what themes you intend to tackle in longer works before you start, or are the themes a fun little surprise you don't uncover until the nth draft?
We are pantsers of the highest calibre. We have never once decided on a theme until at least the 3rd draft!
I have a few general themes when I set out; big ideas I want the story as a whole to cover. Others arise in the writing, though, and if I notice them early enough, I decide whether or not to lean into them.
