arielgalloway

[arielgalloway]

STOP MAKING AI BOOK COVERS.

If your book cover is AI, why the fuck should anyone support your creative work?

Look, I know we’re all broke, but artists know that you’re probably not making six-figures as a writer and are generally willing to work with you on payment plans. Many artists will discuss how to simplify something to make it easier/faster for them and cheaper for you. Have a budget of $0? Good news, there’s an absolute MOUNTAIN of incredible art in the public domain. Stop seeing AI as an option. Kneecapping another creative professional to sell your own creative work is vile.

[arielgalloway]

I swore I wouldn’t do this until I was totally finished with all writing and initial proofreading/edits for our book buuuuuut I’m out of ADHD meds and it was almost half price and I got very ‘fuck it I’ve waited a decade’ and HERE WE ARE.

[arielgalloway]

[arielgalloway]

Thirteen years ago, my partner published this poem about going down on me, which still feels like more my achievement than his.

[arielgalloway]

Everything Loghain Mac Tir did he did out of an unfathomable hate for the French. Is he a villain for this? I scoff at you.

[arielgalloway]

Tonight’s mood:

Remember how in 2021 my partner was teaching ESL online and I was working as a freelance writer and we were both making decent-for-us incomes and it was very we’re in our mid-to-late-30s and FINALLY semi-financially stable, yay? And then remember when both of those industries basically collapsed within a year of each other?

Yeah. That was super fun. So anyway what is your opinion on generative AI and why is it that it should be SET ON FIRE?

[arielgalloway]

I don’t know what it is but this man in reading glasses UNDOES me y’all. He wears them when writing and sits across from me sipping tea and making serious-writing-face and then wonders why my word output is a quarter of his asjsjdfsnfkjgsssss

(He doesn’t really wonder that, but I imagine him wondering it and THERE IS AN ANSWER to that question.)

[arielgalloway]

No, of course I don’t slip into my character’s speaking cadence in real life, why would you ask that? I am obviously a very functional adult with a firm grasp on reality vs. fiction.

[arielgalloway]

[arielgalloway]

Hiria Dunning (@hiriadunning.bsky.social) asked this question on bluesky today and I’m having so much fun reading the answers I wanted to try it here as well! Mine: Baldur’s Gate 3—the second act, specifically, Forgotten Realms in general, Wolfwalkers, The Little Mermaid, Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire, Slavic folklore, Slovenian primeval forests, The Wizard of Oz, folk horror in general, Faun Fables, Jesca Hoop’s Hunting My Dress, Lorena McKennitt, The Decemberists’ Hazards of Love

[arielgalloway]

[arielgalloway]

A poem for my trans daughter:

[arielgalloway]

Today’s mood:

[arielgalloway]

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Nymphaeum (1878)

I alight upon the town of Morningbell, whose sprouting I have beheld for many a journey of this world as it spins through the Sea Above.

They—the Morningbell-ringers, the house dwellers—leave the town walls now, in twos and threes, some even in fours. Not hunting, no. Another sort of mischief altogether on their minds, though carnal still, like the hunters. 

Flowers are downed and fires are lit. They are unfoolish with the valley. They know where to step around the deep falls. Traps and ankle-breakers are for lost wanderers. They feed each other berries, chins dribbling red and violet, down their gown-fronts.

Ah, but that will leave a spot! Best to throw our dresses off, right over our heads. So they seem to think. And then the others follow, skirts up and over. Many pairs of breasts under the moon, swaying. Quaking legs below leap over fires and lovers. Bottoms covered in knickers, though for many not for long. The men sprawl below, lapping it all up with their eyeballs.

Yes, Midsummer, or close to. The animal remembers now. The bell-ringers behind the wall keep themselves laced up for so long. The young can never wait out that last spin of the moon, and so they rub and rub again, with this and that lover. Each day for one wink of the moon’s eye.

As they do rub, some deep thing in me lurches, wishing to surface. Like a boy at the bottom of a well, longing for the light above. But memory is not a thing for great big stags, and the ladies’ gyring only stirs my mammal puzzlement. It will take more than this to rear me up on two legs once again.

But why not watch them, nonetheless? 

Aren’t they beautiful, like little bowls of cream at a picnic?

[arielgalloway]

something inside of me is still transformed

something inside of me is transformed still

something inside me is telling me to flip these two words around for five hours instead of, oh I don’t know, finishing this scene?

[arielgalloway]

Me: *casually complaining about literally anything in media and/or infodumping about my headcanons* Jordan: “Oh, that’s interesting. Do you want me to run a tabletop where we can see how that plays out?” MARRY YOUR DM, y’all.

[arielgalloway]