jpnadia

[jpnadia]

were deer in the forest

heck yeah @tltbb! I had a great time working with artists @youweremyridehome and @nhylluan as well as with betas @pinkit​ and @lesbitomboyish​ on my self-indugent college/coffee shop/rugby AU.

First two chapters are up, 6900 words between them. (Nice.)

were deer in the forest

Rating: T (who even am I?)

Ships: Foreground Griddlehark. Background Dvke (with Pyrrha platonicmarried to G1deon), CamCor, and Babs/Pal

Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Romance, Humor, Mutual Pining, Rugby, Gideon Nav Does Niche Sports

What matters is that the soft couches and chairs muffle the clink of ceramic and the incessant chatter, preventing the atmosphere from overwhelming her. The lights are dim, Harrow can get a steamed milk, and she and her study partner can spread their eight hundred textbooks out over the corner booth and make serious progress on their project for ARCH 309, Archaeological Science.

Summary: After a K-12 career plagued by Gideon Nav’s absurd and insulting chivalry, Harrowhark Nonagesimus goes to college, looking forward to a future forever free of redheaded menaces. She’s got a freshly declared major, a study partner almost as smart as she is, and a new favorite coffee shop that offers menu items she can actually consume. Her optimism lasts until Palamedes Sextus holds their group project hostage, forcing her to attend a rugby game as his moral support. There, on the pitch, muddy and bloody and beaming, Gideon Nav scores a try. And then-- to compound the indignity-- Palamedes drags her to the drink-up afterward. For the first time in her life, Harrow finds herself enmeshed in a friend group-- and even worse, that friend group includes Gideon Nav.

[jpnadia]

[image ID: Palamedes and Harrow sit in a corner spot under a sloping part of the ceiling of an almost cavernous looking dimly lit café with exposed stone walls and old mis-matched furniture and light fixtures. On a baroque-style green velvet sofa on the left sits Palamedes who is a light brown skinned lanky young man with large round glasses and short messy brown hair, wearing a crinkled grey dress shirt and jeans. He is too tall for the low table so he sits crouched over it with his chest and his entire left arm on the surface and is resting his chin on his left hand. He is saying something as he’s looking at and gesturing with his right hand towards a piece of paper on the table. On the opposite seat - an 80’s style simple blue couch - sits Harrow. She is a light brown skinned petite young woman with close-cropped almost-black hair, dressed in a deep red turtle neck. She is invested in the conversation as she looks at Palamedes fondly and is wearing a soft smile. Both of her elbows sit on the table as her cheek rests on her right fist, in which she is holding a pen. Her left hand is resting on the piece of paper Palamedes is gesturing to. On top of the simple combination of a beige tablecloth underneath and rust-coloured smaller tablecloth on top of it, rests a number of opened and unopened books, papers, pens, a binder and a pencil case. The two people and their study materials are illuminated by a simple red ceiling lamp. In front of Harrow sits a small brown cup of a steaming drink while Palamedes’ steaming glass cup sits precariously to his right and is uncomfortably close to the edge of the table. end ID]

An illustration i did for We’re Deer in the Forest by jpnadia, created for The Locked Tomb Big Bang.

More works from the event are being posted daily until June 30th so keep checking @tltbb for more!

[jpnadia]

Harry isn’t quite out of his teens when it fully hits him—the war, the blood and the guts spread across the corridors of Hogwarts, the screams and sobs, the nightmares, the shadows that never seem to leave him.

It’s too much.

He gets a flat in London—Muggle London. Hermione and the Weasleys give him space. Kingsley ensures the wizarding world gives him privacy. Not that some aren’t reluctant. Rita Skeeter releases articles every day, wondering when their Boy Who Lived will return.

But Harry doesn’t see those articles.

He tries to forget who he is for awhile.

His flat is cozy. He stuffs it with plants and paintings and books. He has a cat (or three). He wears sweaters and blazers with corduroy pants. He goes to the market every morning to buy fruits and vegetables. That’s where he meets the kindly old woman who lives down the street.

She lived through World War II and so many other wars, wars that Harry has never experienced but can only imagine.

She goes to his house and she goes to hers. There’s always tea and small cakes and dinners and cocoa—apparently she believes that a teenager needs cocoa—and baking and reading and knitting.

Harry uses magic to brew the cocoa one day, not realizing that she’s standing in the doorway. She calms him by telling him that she knows all about magic. 

Their conversations shift after that. They talk about their favorite creatures and how hard it was to watch them perish before their eyes. They talk about the wall that seemingly gave way to let them enter the magical world. They talk about lions and friends and family and love and betrayals and life and death.

“When did you leave?” Harry asks one day.

She pauses, a hand resting on his cat’s head. After a moment, she looks up with a heaviness in her eyes, a heaviness that Harry sees when he looks in the mirror everyday. 

“I was young,” she says. “Younger than you are now. But I had already grown up. I didn’t want to leave, not really, but it became too much.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Some days I do, some days I don’t.” 

“Yeah…”

It’s a few months later, when he’s helping her shovel the first snow from her walkway, that he asks, “Did you ever try going back?”

“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t,” she says, shoving a cup of cocoa into his hands. “I was shut out as soon as I hesitated.”

He pauses, nearly dropping the cocoa, before whispering, “That’s horrible.”

“What about you?” She escorts him inside, her cane tapping against the floor that he’s magically heated to warm her feet. “Would you be welcomed back?”

“Oh, yeah,” Harry says. “Til they turn on me because they don’t like the color of my shirt or because I sneezed the wrong way or because—you name it.”

She laughs and he smiles.

“Imagine that,” she softly says. “Rulers of our worlds and we’re not even allowed in them.”

“Imagine that.”

He does go back to the wizarding world, of course, but he never forgets his London flat. He visits the street from time to time, knowing that Susan Pevensie will be there, ready to push a cup of cocoa into his hands.

[jpnadia]

[jpnadia]

all of thor’s girl friends are lesbians and he goes with them to asgardian pubs to be their wingman

[jpnadia]

I Was Trying To Be Funny But It Came Out as Really Mean: A 5-part documentary starring me.

[jpnadia]

There’s a little rat inside your head.

This rat doesn’t know anything, but it knows that sometimes snacks fall into its cage, and sometimes the floor shocks its feet.  It likes the snacks, and it hates the shocks.  It will tell you to do things that produce snacks, and it will tell you not to do things that produce shocks.

This little rat is not the only power inside your head, and it might not be the strongest, but it’s there and it has influence.

So pay attention to how you’re treating the little rat.

If every time you learn something new, you say to yourself “ugh, I’m so ignorant for not already knowing this,” you’re shocking the rat.  You’re teaching it to be afraid of learning new things, to associate it with embarrassment and self-criticism.

Remember to feed the rat instead.  Tell it “now I know, and that is good,” and let it eat its snack in peace.

If every time you take care of yourself and your home, you say to yourself “ugh, I never do this enough, and I’ll never get it right,” you’re shocking the rat.  You’re teaching the rat that it was safer when you didn’t try to take care of things.

Feed the rat instead.  Praise what you have done, forgive what you haven’t, so the rat can feel safe.

When the rat takes a step in the right direction, even if the step is too small or slow or not in quite the right direction, feed it.  Don’t shock it for being imperfect; it’ll only learn not to take any steps at all.  Feed it, and let it get bolder, and take bigger steps, and give it bigger rewards for those bigger steps.

Be kind to your little rat.

[jpnadia]

I am a student who writes and loves to do so. And now, I am facing The Decision of my life, i.e., Which College? What Course? And I wanted to know if it is worth it. To be a writer, full time. I am and will always be a writer, despite my choices, but I want to know if being a writer full time will be pay me enough to live. And I have heard a lot of people who tell me to put my brain into the Science Department rather than spin lies. As a creative professional, what would you advice?

Dear writer-birds-sanctuary,

It’s funny — funny strange, maybe, rather than funny ha ha — to think that I am technically a full time writer, because I am also not. The most accurate description is actually: the majority of my income is from my writing. 

I don’t think that I am a full-time writer, though.

I don’t even really know what I would do if that was true, if most of my time was spent actively writing or story-making. I would run out of things to write about. I would write the same story and people over and over again with different names and different settings. I would create unhealthy goals for myself of ever bigger sales or more awards in writing, because if writing was my sole and most important path, I would do nothing but try to improve myself in that department year after year.

But I don’t think I am a full-time writer, although I am a professional writer. I have a music studio and an art studio, and I consider myself equally a musician and artist. I am mad about cars, and spend a decent amount of time in motorsports or just fucking around in mine or other people’s. I’m raising two strange children. I live on a farm. I have taken up occasional blacksmithing. 

That is what I am, full-time. 

And then I write about it, and am paid for it. This doesn’t mean that this writing doesn’t occupy quite a bit of my time on the pie chart of my weeks. But if you were to take one of these things away: the music, the art, the writing — well, if I was only a writer, there wouldn’t be anything to me. If it was some sort of faustian bargain, I’d give up the writing and find something else to do for money. Writing’s a byproduct, a synthesis of the rest of my life. My uncanny family and my close friends lead me to write the Raven Cycle. My love of cars leads me to write for Jalopnik and Road & Track. My memories of what it was like to be a struggling, ambitious teen lead me to write this answer. 

I guess what I’m saying is don’t put the horse behind the carriage. Follow your passion, and then write about the emotional truth of that. If you love biology, study the hell out of that, then infuse your novels with it. Don’t worry that you’ll suffer by not majoring in English (I majored in History and took zero writing classes)(I also wrote zero words of fiction while in college, but still had a writing career by 26). There are other ways to learn to write novels and my professional writing friend are evenly split in the writing degree versus not. If you don’t love biology, only like it … maybe major in it anyway.

Because you will be poor.

A very few authors manage to not be poor straight out of the gate, but most have to scrape their way up over five years, ten years. I was one of the scrapers, writing on the side while making my living as a portrait artist. I’m not very good about writing when I am also fretting about money — it makes me slow, and also resentful of whatever it is I’m writing — and so for me, I’d rather put the burden of urgently paying my bills on something that is not my current novel. Nowadays that means that my past novels are paying my mortgage while my current project is paying future bills. But back then, it meant I was happier having another job while I worked out getting published. 

And, I mean, biologist sounds like a good job.

This has gotten very long and it’s all saying essentially the same thing: don’t let WRITER be your identity, even if WRITING is your ultimate job. Don’t conflate FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS with IGNORE COMMON SENSE. Don’t believe that somehow putting aside your writing to get a degree in Zebra Husbandry means you have abandoned your true self. Don’t think about a ticking clock, think only about forward movement. Pursue whatever degree will give you that balance of identity, security, and vivid creative material. Only you can answer which degree fills in that blank.

urs,

Stiefvater

P.S. College really is not the Decision of Your Life and it makes me sad that this is the biggest lie we’ve told Millennials. College can be intensely meaningful, or intensely not … it’s like high school. Just a handful of years with ever so many more years of life that come after it, plenty of time to change your stars or erase its value or harm or mediocrity. In the end, it didn’t matter where I went to college. I have friends who were shaped by theirs. Don’t give it more emotional weight than it deserves.

[jpnadia]

“What the hell is wrong with you two” - Patty when she walks in on them half-naked with a fire burning on the floor, probably.

[jpnadia]

diverse lit: [4/4] lgbtqa relationships » holly prescott & angela montgomery

The kiss transformed into something world-changing, warming the air, slowing time. The sun shimmered behind Holly’s closed eyelids, and above their heads the wind whispered promises to the leaves.

[jpnadia]

Some In Other Lands characters! I don’t think I’ve ever actually drawn anyone other than the main trio despite meaning to for ages…

[jpnadia]

Y’all gotta fucking read In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan. 

Sometimes it’s not the kid you expect who falls through to magicland, sometimes it’s … Elliot. He’s grumpy, nerdy, and appalled by both the dearth of technology and the levels of fitness involved in swinging swords around. He’s a little enchanted by the elves and mermaids. Despite his aversion to war, work, and most people (human or otherwise) he finds that two unlikely ideas, friendship and world peace, may actually be possible.

THESE KIDS NEED HUGS AND RESPECT

[jpnadia]

Holtzmann + outfits

[jpnadia]

Five years ago Sarah Rees Brennan emailed Kelly her story, “Wings in the Morning,” for our anthology Monstrous Affections. It was long: 17,000+ words

[jpnadia]

How Holtzmann came to the conclusion that she was dating Erin Gilbert