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Commission for @mj-bites of Mirabel (Fate) and the Keeper from the Starless Sea, thanks so much, friend!

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The Ship of Dreams

I made this collage a while ago and realised I don't think I ever posted it here - Lenore's ship out on the honey-sea.

This is one of my favourite presiding images from The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern: that wide open blackness, all the light from beneath, a fairytale ship with blood-red sails. Enchanting i loooooove

Anyway, new cover photo!

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DRABBLE

Many attempts have been made to map the Harbour. Serious cartographers with those two-pointed compasses and grid-lined paper. Determined young men in tweed jackets with balls of string and keen journaling habits. Librarians with boxes of index cards and complex, many-digit categorisation codes, frowning at the shelves and muttering numbers to themselves as they go. But it is young Eleanor, rabbit-mask in place, who baffles all Harbour-goers when she announces that she never gets lost. “How can this be?” they ask her. And her answer: “Well I always set out to find somewhere new, and I manage it every time!”

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DRABBLE HOURS

Zachary Ezra Rawlins is playing a video game. Which game is not really important - one of those ones with many co-existing adventures and lots of side quests. Mid cut-scene he realises that this game, too, is about Fate. Maybe they all are. Maybe he is, too. He adjusts his glasses. He has fuzzy socks on and he crosses his legs, watching the cut-scene. He starts to laugh. Eventually he starts to cry. When Dorian comes home later, he holds him for a long moment. And when Dorian asks him if he is okay, he says ‘yes’, and he means it.

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-A stream at Frederiksværk, Denmark-

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Made a Fortunes and Fables quiz!

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NEW FIC NEW FIC NEW FIIIIC

This is absolutely the dumbest thing I've ever written - I am so proud of her tho lol.

Sick fic!! Dedicated to my fried who is the king of sick fic, and also had Covid last week, inspiring me to produce this piece of nonsense lol

Dorian gets sick - which doesn't happen very often and he handles poorly. Bit like me attempting to write something short and fun for my friends and it ending up being 30k long.

ENJOY

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Harbour Drabble Event 2024 coming soon!!!!!!!!!!

Hey everyone! So brilliant news...July is coming up and I've been thinking about the drabble event we hosted in our server last summer, and how much fun it was and how batshit insane i went on it lol, and I've decided it's a good idea to host it again this year! so this is the post with all the important info for the Harbour Drabble Event 2024 <3333333

"what is this even anyway roo???"

you may ask! if you were not here a year ago! it's a very lowkey event, low commitment for anyone who wants to participate- basically the idea is that you write drabbles about The Starless Sea during or before the month of July and submit them, and I'll post them on this blog!

if you don't know what a drabble is!! it's a very short piece of fanfiction- we're going for this event with the traditional definition meaning its exactly 100 words of fic, usually capturing just one small moment! i highly recommend going for it if you've never written drabbles before, it's a really fun creative exercise and way to write fic without spending a huge amount of time! i had never written a drabble before we did this event last year and i became. quite prolific lol

"ok but what do i do with the drabbles tho????"

some options! you can:

post them to your own tumblr blog and tag us so i can reblog them!

submit them to this blog so i can post them!

if youre in the server and more comfortable with discord you can dm them to me and i will post them here!

"ok fine so what do i write drabbles about then"

the starless sea! lol

last year i gave myself a theme for every weekday (because i was posting AT LEAST once daily god that was unhinged id be like posting two drabbles from an airplane or some shit) but anyway i thought id use these as optional prompts for the event this year! these are not mandatory just some ideas of what to write!

More Drabbles Monday - anything lol

Time and Fate Tuesday - drabbles about Mirabel and the Keeper or their previous incarnations!

Cheese Wednesday - not actually one of my themes last year but kristin @boogleboot wanted a cheese day so a cheese day you will have my dear <333

Monday Part Two Thursday - anything again

Fateheart Friday - drabbles focusing on characters, events, and/or the new Harbour from Fateheart! (the greatest known work of tss fanfic if you havent read it you should)

Sad Times Saturday - angst <3333

Son of the Fortune Teller Sunday - drabbles about Madame Love Rawlins and her children <3333 (yes dorian and kat are her children be so fr)

more prompts may be to come! but yes submit drabbles any time from now until the end of July <33333 love you all peace out

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PEWPEWPEWPEWWWWW

das the sound of a new fic!!!!!!!

This one is set a few years after Fateheart, and was inspired by an idea from a good friend in the Harbour discord (JOIN US: https://discord.gg/5bAc23ax): an Inigo Montoya fic - Dorian's past coming back to look him in the eye. She very generously said "uhh yeah sure, go for it" when I started frothing at the mouth over writing this idea, and for that I give her the greatest thanks. One wet smack for u, Zing, ily.

This was also an opportunity for me to attempt a writing exercise of sorts that had occurred to me a while ago, but I didn't have a story to go with it at that point. A fic that took the form of a conversation between a series of paintings. It began with Magritte, which was Zachary Ezra Rawlins' fault, and it ended here.

This is also a fic about the Parliament of Owls, which, as they have become more and more developed in my head, are increasingly the subject of everything I write.

I thought for a while that this one wouldn't get finished, but it has come to have quite a place in my heart, not in spite of all its quirks but because of them. Glad to give the protagonist of this one his moment in a world beyond the sun. Hope you enjoy.

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Starlight Lantern // Mystery Glass Art

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getting a bit teary for the love my man Leander is being shown!!!!

Leander means a lot to me <3 happy birthday bro

ON BEHALF OF THE HARBOUR I WOULD LIKE TO SAY

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LEANDER!!!!!!!!!!

Leander may not appear in the starless sea even once but through all of the love he has gotten in our fandom I think its fair to say he is definitely canon in our hearts!!!!!! from @boogleboot's fan sequel Fateheart (and its sequel coming At Some Point to ao3s near you) to AUs like my Rollins au and kristins pern au, Leander has become one of the core cast of characters that our fandom holds dear and I could not be more proud of him and of Kristin for it. Hes my favorite little guy and honestly I just want you all to know how much I love him and to read Fateheart if you haven't so you too can experience the joy of Leander 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰

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Another little Starless Sea ficlet!

This is a scene exploring Dorian in the early days of his relationship with Zachary. A little bit hurt/comfort, a little bit reflective, a little bit heavy on the boat imagery.

But I love me a gimmick.

Set, as ever, during the events of Fateheart

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hey @erinmorgenstern I'm writing a full-length Starless Sea followup fic that uses Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as its central narrative device. any thoughts on the intersection between those stories?????????

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hi i just finished fateheart and i just want to say INCREDIBLE job, i am sufficiently insane over it. thank u <3

ohh thank you! Messages like this make it all worthwhile <3 I'm so pleased with the general response to Fateheart. the next book in the series is well on its way!

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One year since Fateheart

A year ago I posted Fateheart: A Starless Seaquel to Ao3 (link here) - the mammoth fanfic sequel to Erin Morgenstern's The Starless Sea.

Fateheart has had an incredible year, and has completely changed my life, by all measures. Posting it has connected me to so many wonderful people and helped bring together a genuine community over on the Starless Sea discord (which you should join hey here's a link) who have supported me through the last hellish few weeks of uni assignments as well as months and months of creative projects and ambitious fic writing.

So on this blessed solstice day, here is a lil update for those who are following the slow progress of the unofficial Starless Sea canon as developed in Fateheart.

Oh that's right, baby. It ain't just one fan sequel. It's gonna be uhhh (checks notes) at least four.

I really really wanted to get the next book out at this year mark - on the solstice and year anniversary - but despite hitting that 50k mark for NaNoWriMo last month it just didn't happen (it's been a rough couple months - I am currently doing a master's course that is kicking my ass).

But I am determined to get Fever Pitch, the next full-novel-length follow-up story, out in full as soon as humanly possible. Toward that end I have gone ahead and made a posting for it. The first few chapters are done and have been done for a while, so I shall slowly be posting them as I work on the rest.

Watch this space!!!!

I never really intended Fever Pitch to be a fully-fledged sequel. Mind you, I didn't intend that with Fateheart either, but in a different way. In my mind the next book in the sequence is and always has been a story called The Lotus Flowers. Nearly 180k words of that one exist, but it is too important a story not to get right. So I'm gonna give it as much time as it needs - and it may need quite a lot.

But in working on Lotus Flowers, I came to realise that a lot of the world-building and character development which I was taking for granted was in fact not as obvious to the reader as it would be to me - LF is, after all, set ten or so years after Fateheart, and considering all of The Starless Sea (at least for Zachary and Dorian) takes place in about two weeks, ten years is space enough for a LOT of story.

So in order to strengthen my sense of where Zachary, Dorian, and Kat have found themselves by the ten year mark, I started noting down some of the more important moments from that decade of time. And then just kept writing. And writing and writing and writing until a handful of them were fully fledged novellas.

I have put up the polished ones - they are collected together on Ao3 as 'Fateheart: The Extended Canon'. Which is. A bit pretentious. But whatever. (Also I'm not kidding myself that all the fics in this collection are vital plot points, but there are a couple standout ones which are Canon Events in my mind, that will be referenced in later full-length fics. Namely A Heart That Won't Break, Death in the Valley, and The Man Named Sky.)

But one of these short (aspirationally) stories seemed as I wrote to have particular space in it for so much of that world-building and exposition, and that was Fever Pitch.

Fever Pitch takes place five years after the birth of the Harbour, and the events of Fateheart, and is an Alice-in-Wonderland themed story which explores the lives of all the main Fateheart characters (Zachary, Dorian, Kat, and Leander, namely), introduces some new players (shoutout Tabuzae and Kirsty Baudeville), as well as establishing the limits and life of the Harbour they live in.

I'd say a solid sixty percent of this story currently exists, and I'm gonna amp up the pressure on myself to complete it by posting it as I go - something I've never done before, so bear with me.

It means so much to me that there are people out here who care as much about these people and this little world on the Starless Sea as I do - even more so that so many people have loved my offerings of more story. The above photo is of my christmas present from a housemate who was one of Fateheart's earliest readers. It's so beautiful it makes my heart leap.

We rise, we fall - as stories do.

I am committed to seeing this story through, by the way - all the way to the end - and that is gonna take years. But we start here - with the next book in the series. First few chapters to appear over Christmas.

Until then, happy solstice. To seeking x

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Come join the discord!

If you're reading this you'd be so welcome.

And a happy non-denominational winter season to you all <3

Hi and welcome to the Harbour!

This is our official blog for the Harbour Discord, a Discord server dedicated to The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern! Our fandom has grown and thrived in this server and it's super cool and swag so I think you should totally join if you love The Starless Sea! Here is the link click on it do it do it now

But a couple things about this blog first:

Hi, I'm Roo! I created the Harbour Discord and I'm now running this blog! I use he/they pronouns and my main is @thatwasntlikeridingabikeuasshole! Along with running this Discord and now this blog I also write copious amounts of Starless Sea fanfiction, including far too many AUs, one of which is actually completed which blows my mind! Go read the Rollins AU on Ao3!

I run the server alongside my dearest most beloved friend Kristin, aka @boogleboot, who is not only the best co-mod I could ask for but also the author of the longest and most wonderful Starless Sea fanfic Fateheart: A Starless Seaquel on Ao3! As well as many other absolutely gorgeous fics <3333

This blog was primarily created for the purpose of running server events, but I'm hoping to make it just a general home for the fandom on Tumblr!

And now my pitch for the server, all the reasons why you definitely should join:

We have so many incredible fanart and fanfic writers sharing their work! The pfp and header on this blog are just two examples of the kinds of art we see from our best artists and there is Constant fic and headcanons coming out!

When you are sad you can ask "what are zachary and dorian doing right now" or some variation thereof and like three people will come out of the woodwork with the softest most comforting headcanons

We read to each other! Storytime is frequent and can include Starless Sea fanfic, excerpts from the book itself, or just other books we're in the mood to read!

We do movie nights occasionally (or yknow. movie mornings movie afternoons) and watch movies together and it's silly and goofy and fun

And we run events that involve prompts for art and fic and encouraging each other on our creative ventures and it is just so nice. You should join!!!!

That's it that's all! We hope you enjoy your stay 🐝🗝️🗡️