To The Person Who Walked Past The Window - Jordan Bolton

My first book ‘Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car’ is now available to pre-order! Get it here - https://smarturl.it/BlueSky

alive at the end of the world by Saeed Jones

Masterpost:

Hello, my name is Meadow, and I am a 22-year-old university student who loves to draw and write.

My writing is SFW, but I do commonly write about the darker parts of the human experience such as addiction, self-harm, and abuse. I will, however, do my best to tag that in my writing so no one is blindsided.

Writing:

I decided to put my writing on this site because I was afraid for years that my work was not worth sharing if it was not perfect. It has taken me a long time to realize that not only is that not true, but it harms my ability to be the creative individual I want to be. Thus, I forewarn you, the reader, that these stories will not be perfect and that is fine by me. My goal is not to achieve perfection but, rather, to strive for progress. So, by all means, leave constructive criticism, but note that cruelty will fall on deaf ears. With that said, enjoy the stories below. They are all cherished in their own right.

Questions/Suggestions/Prompts:

Feel free to suggest prompts if there is something you would like me to write about. I am always looking for more practice. :)

I'm also open to answering questions about my work or characters, though I can't always guarantee an answer due to possible spoilers for future stories.

Fan fiction:

Personal Writing:

Coren: (Genre: Fantasy)

Note that my writing within this world is disjointed. There will be some full-fledged stories, but also some test scenes. I am simply in the process of seeing what works and what doesn't.

I just know Franz Kafka would have done fucking numbers on Tumblr

He is doing numbers here

Happy Indigenous History Month + Pride Month ❤️

Without Reservations - Ricardo Caté // #StandingRockTwoSpirits // Historical Photo of Two-Spirit Natives // Griffin Germain // Diné Pride (Cayla Nimmo)

And the story carries on

When you were young, your mother used to read you an old fairytale every night before bed.

It was a sad story, about lovers who walked through hell to reunite with one another and almost succeeded, only to be separated again forever in the last moment. It made you cry, and the next night you would beg your mom to read it again.

"You know it'll be sad, right?"

"This time they'll win, mom! This time they'll have a happy ending!"

But they didn't. Nor did they win in the next night, or the night after that.

Deep down, logically, you knew it'll always end the same way. The story is done. It's been told long before you were born. But when mom was telling it, you could pretend that maybe this time it'll work out. This time will be different.

When you grew older you didn't stop pretending, even though you knew it was silly and getting sillier. When you learned to read and write, one of the first things you wrote was a new ending. It was bad, about you as an all-powerful angel coming down to help the lovers reunite and then you get invited to their wedding.

"It's not real, it's fanfic." a friend told you when you showed them. They explained the word, and you saw what they meant. But you didn't care, seeing the words on the page helped you pretend.

You read voraciously as you grew. All kinds of stories with all kinds of ending. But you kept coming back to that one. Reading from your mom's old copy which her read to her from.

You didn't need mom to read to you anymore, but sometimes you asked her to anyway. Occasionally she'd do it, but more often than not she was tired.

Soon she stopped reading. Then she stopped speaking altogether, her voice too weak and throat too sick to speak aloud. That's when you started reading the story to her.

It was hard at first, your tears choking you up. It was hard pretending that the story will end differently.

"The diagnoses are just estimates, probabilities." your dad said. And when he spoke, you could pretend there was a chance. But when the doctors spoke, their words felt as final and unchanging as the old words in the storybook.

Eventually, mom was no more. Your dad read something personal and touching in her funeral. Everyone thought you would, too. Everyone knew how much you loved writing since you were little.

You thought you would write too, imagined it in your mind as your mother's end drew near. You had so much to say, but the words wouldn't come out. The only words that would come to you were from the story. You tried to bat them away, but you knew you couldn't. You couldn't change this ending.

When it came your time to eulogize, you pulled out the book and without preamble started reading from the second-to-last page. This time there was no pretending.

Everyone knew the story, even the people who didn't know mom personally. Everyone knew it will end in tragedy. The lovers will not get a happy ending.

Except this time they did.

You didn't notice the change until you were halfway through the final page, so out of it you were. But the reactions from the mourning crowd clued you in. Your stoic dad choking down a chuckle.

You looked closely at the book and saw the words were written in your mom's neat handwriting.

You kept on reading, a smile on your face.

It wasn't the real ending. It was fanfic.

But just for a little while, seeing the words on the page helped you pretend a little longer.

editing your own writing is like woah you really like commas........ maybe ease up on those commas there, pal........ maybe Fewer commas would be nice

I think people tend to forget that herbivores are incredibly dangers.

those first couple weeks after escaping a time loop have gotta be disorienting as all fuck. all those little cues that used to tell you what's about to happen are now triggers that cause you to brace for something that isn't coming. you have to relearn the permanence of death -- hell, you have reacquaint yourself with the entire concept of finality altogether. everything keeps changing but it never changes back and you keep having to remind yourself that this is normal. "it won't reset anymore," you echo to yourself, over and over and over, like a broken record, like you're still trapped in a loop, like someone who escaped the time loop but was doomed to bring it into the future with them

Thank you! There really needs to be more stuff about what happens to a person after the time loop ends. The story just always ends with them being so excited that it’s fixed and everything’s over. Give me a guy fucking something up and just leaving it for an hour because ‘it’s just gonna reset soon’ and then the cold dread of realization that oh shit, it’s NOT gonna reset this time! Maybe this time it was something small like a dropped plate but what if it had been something big? What if he had accidentally hit someone with his car and just kept driving because ‘I’ll just avoid them next time’? And what about all the seemingly innocuous bullshit that culminated in huge butterfly effects when he was stuck? What’s going to happen if steps on that flower? Will it somehow cause a nuclear meltdown three towns over?

Just a guy who slowly spirals into madness and no one can help him because they don’t believe the time loop ever happened

@official-time-loop-posts

I'm gonna say it.

It's unhinged to assume that someone's taste in fiction equates to what they believe is moral or good, or is something they want to see or experience in real life.

That is a bonkers assumption to make.

I'm tired of humoring people with long arguments about it when the simple fact is it is a totally fucking absurd reach to accuse someone who enjoys something in fiction of being in favor of it in real life.

I'm tired of pretending like this is a legitimate position to hold-- that they should be afraid of fiction's dire influence on a reader's moral decay or that it's a sign of what the author secretly wants for realsies in real life.

“the problem is its never gonna be what all the fans want” imo the problem is the majority of fans have bad fucking taste like. if you write a story with the intent to keep editing it in line with what fans want you’re gonna end up with a shitty story. obviously you can take in criticism from early access but once you publish the thing you shouldn’t constantly be retconning characterization wtf. good god

also even if they didn’t have bad taste where is your fucking spine. commit to the bit already you cannot avoid criticism

You meet god and she's mostly dead fish. You ask her why and she says most of the world is dead fish, and she's made herself to appeal to the most common denominator, the everyman funnyman comedy show that runs for eleven seasons but with the entire universe in mind. You ask her how much of the dead fish is your fault, she says it's far less than you'd think, in the grand scheme of things. You ask her if you matter at all. If you can do anything. She shrugs her rotting shoulders and says mattering is a made-up concept, like life, but sure, you can matter if you want to, on some scale. She has many scales. She doesn't know what you mean by 'anything', but you can do everything you can. You ask her if it's enough. She says there's no base requirement for deserving to exist. She's smoking a joint and the smoke filtering out of her gills gathers and forms gas giants and red dwarfs. You ask her if there's any hidden secrets of the universe you should know and she says it's not a secret if she tells, plus it's fun to let you figure it out yourself. You ask her if any of your questions were right questions and she says you worry about being right so much it might keep you from fucking around, which is as close to meaning of life as she ever bothered to make. You don't ask but she says she loves your hair, also your whole being, also your planet. She says she figured out what love is yesterday and is trying it out, which explains the ten thousand rainbows and sudden influx in rains of fish. She offers you a drag of her joint and you wake up half past midnight behind a chain restaurant clutching a smoked salmon. The new stars are winking like they're in on some joke and you're sure if you try hard enough you'll remember what it is.

@my-username-goes-here asked me about Beetle God, so here goes:

When I was a child, I read a book about biology, focusing primarily on animal species. It had this ornate illustration of beetles cycling the globe and suggested that, as beetles (Coleoptera) were believed to be the most populous order of animals on earth—there are currently 400,000 described beetle species—there was something like 1 beetle species to every 5 other species on the planet, a 1:5 ratio. I believe the ratio is now closer to 1:4; 25% of all known and described life on Earth is made up of beetle species.

Naturally, knowing as I had been taught that the Christian God had made the world in His own image, I began to believe that He must look like a rather large beetle.

Later, I read the (possibly apocryphal) quote of J. B. S. Haldane in an ecology book. Paraphrased here by Wikipedia: "This immense diversity [of beetle species on Earth] led the evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane to quip, when some theologians asked him what could be inferred about the mind of the Christian God from the works of His Creation, 'An inordinate fondness for beetles.'"

From an author at the WSU Libraries:

"Another way to look at your question [about how many beetles there are] is how many individual beetles are on Earth right now. [Joel] Gardner did the math to figure that out.

He told me scientists think there are around 10 quintillion individual insects. … If 5% of all those insects are beetles, there are probably around 500 quadrillion individual beetles.

Pretend you’re the beetle boss. You make those 500 quadrillion beetles line up. If they’re all half an inch long – about average size for beetles – that line of beetles would wrap around the Earth more than 150 million times. That’s a lot of beetles."

Another childhood quirk I had was getting really angry at other children on the playground who killed insects for fun. I almost got in a fistfight with a boy who habitually stomped on honeybees which landed on the clover. I spent a lot of time digging up small harmless creatures—worms, roly-polies, ground beetles, ants—and gently playing with them or letting them crawl on my hands.

A few years ago I had a dream. An enormous female rhinoceros beetle with a shiny black carapace sat on a golden throne. She was God, and She was reaching out compassionately to her subjects who had sinned on earth. A human man knelt in front of her. "Why did you step on My creation, made in the image of Myself?" she asked. "Why did you crush the harmless beetle beneath your heel, thinking of it as a creature lower than the earth? Did I not give to you all the creatures of the earth to cherish, guide, and protect? Did you have the misapprehension that God loves only Her humans, when even the smallest and most insignificant beast was crafted by Her own hands?"

In the scope of Creation, you are no more than a beetle and no less than a nebula. God may appear as anything She chooses, but more often than not She prefers the form of a beetle.

OH? MY GOD??

There's such a thing as a wolf in sheep's clothing. I've seen one.

It was standing right by that tree on the sun-facing meadow, bathed in moonlight. The herd was asleep, with the mountainside just behind. That night, I hadn't been able to sleep, curled up beside my mother - it was my first winter.

The wolves had been howling all night, the locations of their packs and territory echoing across and over the valleys. A few restless sheep still ambled around, grazing halfheartedly. Rufus, the big, fluffy one with the splotchy-dark fur, was sat a short ways away from the rest of the herd, occasionally rising, yawning, and sauntering over to another location on the outskirts of the group.

Terrified, but not wanting to move or wake anybody, I kept my eyes locked on every movement, and my ears locked on every sound. When the moon had eventually risen to almost the very centre of the sky, the whole valley was illuminated in a mute monochrome, like a dream. Slowly, I had started to associate between the wolf-calls and Rufus's movements. When a particularly loud, particularly close howl would be heard, Rufus would get up and calmly trot over to lie between it and the herd. When I realised that, I started to relax, and let my eyes rest a little.

I think Rufus must have dozed off completely at some point, because I realised, with a start, that the howl I was hearing was far louder, and far closer, than any I'd heard before, and Rufus was sat on the complete other side of the herd.

This was my first time ever seeing a wolf. Two of them had crested the hill. They were... sharp. Their ears and faces poked out, like thistle-thorns. Rufus was a bit pointy, too, but in the same pleasing, round way as a scut tail, or a pair of horns. Still, it's what I saw Rufus do that scares me.

Rufus must have realised at the same time, because as soon as I had glanced over, Rufus was already a blur. I had never, and still haven't since, ever seen a sheep run that fast.

I expected Rufus to ram them, face them down, charge them back. Maybe I was a bit naïve. Still, even now I wouldn't have anticipated what happened. Rufus shifted her posture, spiking up on her long legs. Her face contorted, flaring her ears and sneering back her lips to reveal rows of long, sharp teeth. Even her matted-down fur shifted, now shooting up in fine hairs.

The wolves backed down, Rufus letting out a guttural, almost inaudibly-deep growl the whole time she slowly paced them away from us. The whole herd had been shocked awake at that point, and I squeezed up against my mother's flank, barely able to make out another lamb's bleating over my own pounding heartbeat. But none of them had seen what Rufus had done.

When she came back, the moon was almost behind the mountains. I could barely recognise her in the dark. My mother had nipped me by the back of the neck and dragged me to the centre of the herd, so there were other sheep between us, but... I slept uneasily. Still, I didn't wake for the rest of the night.

The next morning, after the shepherd took us out to graze, I paid close attention to Rufus. When she went over to the shepherd's tent, as she did whenever he whistled, I stared, and listened, straining a little to try to peer into the dark interior. I caught just a glimpse, just the barest glimpse, of the shepherd feeding her something.

And on the breeze, for just a moment, when the wind turned just so, I caught a scent. Meat. And then it was gone.

ok so seriously no hate but I am surprised by responses i.a. 'I love prey-turned-predator stories,' just because I was worried that I might have made the sheepdog 'twist' too prefigurable. hihihi

Fantasy concept: The standard classic fantasy races, but humans are the species that's living the diaspora spread among other peoples' lands and cultures.

Humans are adaptible, can pick up whatever languages and customs they need to, learn to dress according to climate, are capable of digesting almost anything that the majority race commonly eat, can tolerate magic but don't need it to live, and altogether seem to find a way to live comfortably - or at least tolerably - wherever they can live at all. Many races who have humans living among them have a misconception that humans are some kind of sapient chameleons, that just automatically take the shape of their environment without thought or effort.

In truth, human communities are fairly tight-knit and have strong support networks, and they can and will immediately take in any newcomer stray humans and families, teaching them the ropes of how to live here. Not just out of the kindness of their hearts, but pragmatic reasons: one bad human or family will reflect badly on the whole population of the area. It's better to make sure that a stranger has a job than hear your own neighbour say that humans don't have jobs. It's fairly safe to assume that most humans who live in the same city know each other to some extent, but just because they're allies doesn't necessarily mean that they're friends.

While mixbreeding with the local population does happen - humans, for some reason, tend to be far more open to romantic and sexual relationships with other races than the rest, and the ones to do so have an astonishing knack for locating the one specific elf, orc, dwarf or any other who happens to find humans fuckable - and wherever the hybrid offspring aren't sterile, the human population of the area tends to aquire some majority-species blood and traits, mostly the distinct local traits of the human population of any area are cultural, taught and learned from the community.

Some elvish dialects don't have separate words for "half-elf", "a human born and raised in elvish lands", or "human who speaks fluent elvish and knows the customs", and even some elvish humans are surprised to hear that other cultures consider these to be completely separate concepts. As far as they're concerned, humans living among elves are all the same thing. Sometimes a person who's 75% elvish and only has one human grandparent, but was raised by the human side of their family, is considered human-among-elves.

And sometimes the divide between human poulations of different races and cultures is more stark than between the majority peoples themselves - while an orc clan and an elvish city-state might be willing to temporarily set aside their differences to work towards a mutual goal, the orcish humans and elvish humans among them might not.

While the human minorities among other races do have a distinct identity as humans of their own regions, this does not apply to goblins. Neither goblins nor the human populations among them make any distinction at all between the two at all. Both will refer to "their" humans as simply goblins, only specifying "a big one" if necessary, but even then you'll need to see the person in question to know whether they're talking about a human raised with goblins or just a particularly tall, physically large full-blooded native goblin. Goblins do not have a concept of personal property beyond "I had access to it and nobody stopped me from grabbing it, so therefore it's mine", and their humans are therefore goblins too.

Being one of the species combinations whose offspring are infertile, there's no goblin blood among their human populations save for the half-goblin individuals themselves, but considering that spontaneous adoption by simply herding unsupervised orphans into one's home is a commonplace, widely accepted practice and not any more unusual a way to start a family than having biological children, the individuals in question are largely unbothered by it.

While the humans-born-among-goblins aknowledge that they are human, they genuinely do not understand the concept of why one couldn't be both a full 100% human and a full 100% goblin at the same time. While humans from other cultures are confused and annoyed by their insistence, they'll have to agree that any person who'll come to your house as a guest (most likely unprompted and uninvited) and will just casually snatch a bug off your floor and eat it right in front of you, and then interpret the look on your face to mean that they were supposed to ask permission first is definitely a whole, entire full goblin.

The goblin-humans take this as a compliment.

I love villainesses isekais because they always open to some shit like "I've reincarnated as Evilla Von Lily, the empire's only princess and I'm destined to die after becoming affianced to Prince Rytius de Citrus?!?!?" and you think ok so just not marry him, right. Cant be that hard? But then chapter 1 in kicks in like " Evilla, sweetie your father and I are sooo glad you're marrying your Highness prince Rytius otherwise all these 56 orphans we tend to would spontaneously combust. Like, immediately. don't ask, we dont know how either. anyways proud of you" and youre like oh shit evilla

PRINCE RYTIUS?????

The mad dog of the North, ✨ Duke Sekonde Maiye Leed✨, the best option for a convenient one (1) year contract marriage..? And...

If I can break the curse during this one year contract, I can quietly step down from Goodette Goodheart's place .. really looking forward to that peaceful life away from all these good looking men and influence once all this is over wish me luck you guys👍

He doenst want a d Ivorce

Guys stop saying Goodette is in love with me. Just because I haven't antagonized her in this timeline and we're somewhat friendly and she keeps turning up on my house and doesnt seem to like Duke Sekonde all that much it doesnt mean she has feelings for me. In fact, I'm on my way to meet her right now to try and gauge how far off of the original story we're at. like maybe i can still get them together. i think its possible . anyways crossing fingers.

im supposed to meet her for tea but she changed the meeting place to her room all of sudden. More private, I guess! im just glad she trusts me that much. its good to have friends for a change.

awful lot of rose petals in her house today. funny how they seem to lead to her room too. maybe she was gardening early. anyways going in 👍