choose joy

Text: My family breeds monsters to sell to the Hunt. When a prophet says the Queen will die in one’s jaws, they come to slaughter them all, and us for good measure. I escape, with one newborn.

It was never meant to survive, is the thing. It was the runt of its litter, and we don't keep runts. They're not worth trying to keep alive, because if they manage to miraculously survive the first few weeks of their siblings battling for supremacy of the brood, they never grow very large and tend to be timid. Which means they're not worth hunting.

But I'd felt sorry for the little thing, and had impulsively rescued it from getting eaten by its brother almost immediately after hatching. It had snuggled in my arms, only hissing a little, barely any acid dripping from its maw onto my thick leather gloves and vambraces. I'd been bringing it to the forge to let it warm itself in its depths when the soldiers came.

It's the only reason I survive. The only reason we survive. When I hear the screams and shrieks of my family and our Questing Beasts alike, I grab my little beastie and flee out the back door of the forge to hide in the refuse dump.

Nobody spots me, nobody comes looking for me after they search the forge, but I'm able to hear everything.

There's no one left by the time it's safe for us to re-emerge. Just blood and bone, scale and fur, acid and broken bits of armour. My home is ablaze with smokeless mage fire, the only thing that can contain and kill our Beasts, besides iron.

I look down at the last legacy of my family, who looks up at me and rests her talons gently against the hollow of my throat with a soft little trill. Like she grieves with me. Like she grieves for me.

And in that moment, I swear to care for her. Swear to do everything I can to make sure she grows strong and clever and wicked. I will make the queen rue the day she tried to circumvent fate.

I name my little monster Ruin.

ANNA KARENINA Dir. Joe Wright (2012)

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i might make additional add ons to this :)

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A businessman-turned-thief finds himself entangled with a pair of opposing assassins and the roles they unknowingly play in a much grander conspiracy.

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life's too short to write for an imaginary critic that you fear will hate what you wrote

to be clear, odds are good that someone will hate what you wrote, but that doesn't mean the writing is bad. That means they aren't part of your audience.

don't write for them.

Chapter one of Neon Bloodlust is now available to read on ao3, here, for anyone who might be interested.

[ more information on the wip in general can be found here ]

'Hamlet, Prince of Denmark' illustrated by John Austen, 1922

The Loveliness of Decay: Rotting Flesh, Literary Matter, and Dead Media, Jesse Stommel

Jesse knows what the fuck is up

Ernest W. Appleby (British, 1862-1909) - Lady at a gate by moonlight

the one thing i want to be able to do as a writer is make people come back to something ive written. i want that piece of text to haunt them, i want their thoughts to be briefly consumed by this. i want this to be something they remember long after its time. thats the one thing i want to do

i think the reason i feel so offended by biopics about female writers that are all "this exact romantic situation happened to her, and then she simply wrote it down on some paper!" is that they completely disrespect our ability to simply hallucinate a random situation for fun and then become obsessed with it

Something something the fundamentally non-creative Hollywood producers refuse to believe that anyone is more creative than them, a Hollywood Producer, and so they project the most nonsensical normie shit onto the characters of real people who would have run circles around them given chance. And they make bank for it

Writing advice from my uni teachers:

This is legit good writing advice, especially the first bullet point! In playwriting class we did a bit where every bit of dialogue had to be an accusatory question and it was glorious.

When you’re out putting up missing posters for your best friend as you do, years after he went missing and you've secluded yourself in the lodge on the mountain away from everyone and you're out putting up new posters when alight falls from the sky and you go to check, as you do, with the missing posters in your hand, and find a bloodied wounded creature, a being, an angel, and he cannot stay in his inhuman form for long because he's hurt and he's attracting attention

and you're standing there (holding the missing posters) and he sees the picture (from the missing posters) of your best friend and takes on that shape (it is the first human he's seen since falling) (it is best to be something familiar) and you're standing there (holding the missing posters) and your dead best friend is staring back at you.

you're standing there staring at your dead best friend. you know he's dead and the world knows he's dead and you've been up on this mountain all on your own (with the wolves and the deer and the snow) for longer you care to admit, and your dead best friend is staring back at you, big eyed and lost and bloodied and gold, he's so fucking gold that for a moment it hurts to look but you look anyway because you've missed him since you lost him and probably since before and there's nothing in the whole fucking world that could make you look away

and you're standing there and he's sitting there, naked as you've ever seen him, as you've always seen him, and he says to you, "i am not what you think”, but what you here is 'i am not who you think', and it's the middle of winter and you're clutching missing posters baring the face of your dead best friend, staring at the face of your dead best friend, still dead, always dead, never dead, right in front of you bloodied and golden, and you think that maybe, just maybe, like a little fawning dying thing, just maybe you aren't alone anymore.