kajsa-writes-sometimes

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

A drabble is like a sonnet. It has rules. The rules make it an art form. It should have exactly 100 words.

This has been around since the old fandoms, of live journal and newsgroups.

Ficlet. Flashfic. Those are short things.

A drabble is 100 words.

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

cinderella marries the prince

and it’s… fine. The prince is great! They’re in love, he’s very sweet and passionate, writing her poems and songs, giving her anything she wants. The time she spends with her husband is great.

but cinderella is not royalty, her family was noble but she never spent time in those circles. She’s used to being busy, she’s used to cooking and cleaning and mending. There are hours, days, where she has nothing to do.

time passes. cinderella learns the fancy lady type of needlework. Learns to ride horses. Reads a lot.

as is normal for royalty at the time, they travel and are hosted by nobles or stay at castles owned by the king. But even that variety begins to become routine. The prince is distracted, there’s a lot of young women living and working on their route. Daughters of nobles. Younger and prettier with soft hands that have never done a day’s work.

cinderella needs something to spend her time on, and there’s a part of her thinking a couple-only trip might get her husband’s attention again, so she suggests making an old castle that’s fallen into disrepair their “project.” It was built in the time when castles were made to be defensible, so it’s quite sturdy, but it’s overgrown and secluded. The prince doesn’t know why his family stopped living there either. A hundred years ago it was their summer home.

so they go. And they work. And for a while it’s great! But when they leave for winter cinderella’s husband forgets her once again. cinderella resolves to make the best of her life and stop worrying about a man who has gotten what he wanted from her.

summer comes again and this time cinderella goes alone to the old castle (minus staff, of course, but cinderella manages to narrow it down to only repair workers and one maid). She can cook and clean and mend again, but this time it’s her own choice. She is happy.

this summer they make more progress on repairs. The workers say that most of it can be salvaged, except one tower that’s been completely overgrown with vines and briars. It will have to come down, eventually, but for now it can be safely ignored.

cinderella has more free time now. The old castle has a surprisingly untouched library, though time and moisture have damaged many of the books. Behind a collection of greek poetry cinderella finds an old diary. Very old, in fact, at least a hundred years. It’s rude to read a diary, of course, but whoever wrote this is long dead, and cinderella is bored, so…

from the description of activities the author looks to have been nobility. Maybe even a princess. She’s sensitive and sweet and smarter than she seems to realize. If circumstances had been different cinderella wishes they could have been friends…

after the summer ends cinderella returns to her husband. He’s spending a lot of time with a young musician and cinderella can’t even work up the energy to care. She does some research about the castle and the family she’s married into, finds out the name of the princess who wrote the diary.

aurora. Cursed and forgotten. She died young, they say, in a plague that also took out the castle staff and her own parents. Luckily they avoided a succession crisis, but not so lucky for the dead.

time passes. cinderella goes to the old castle again and again, even out of season. Soon enough all that remains to be done is the old tower, and the builders say they should tear it down and fill the gaps before it gets cold.

one night cinderella is restless. The princess from the diary had been fond of that tower, and cinderella is far more attached to a dead woman than she ought to be. She gets out of bed, reads by candlelight, and finally goes to walk the empty halls.

she finds herself going to the tower. Pushing past the vines that don’t seem so troublesome really. They almost part before her. The stairs are perfectly intact, the door at the top is already cracked open. As if she should have done this years ago, cinderella steps into aurora’s bedroom.

she’s as beautiful as the stories say. And sitting under her hands, crossed across her stomach as it rises and falls, is a book of greek poetry.

years later, people will tell the story of cinderella as a cautionary one. Don’t seek above your station. Don’t marry for prestige. After all, a girl who grew up as a servant once married the crown prince, and disappeared after only three years. She ran away, they say, she couldn’t handle the lifestyle.

two old women who run a bookshop together agree with the lesson. Marrying for the wrong reasons never ends well. It’s best to wait for someone you have things in common with, shared interests.

or, failing that, the more linguistic of the two says, wait a decade or ten for someone to fall in love with you from your diary.

her partner laughs and hits her with the socks she is mending.

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

😳 <- this emoji but without the blush or romantic connotation. im not blushing im staring you directly in your fucking eyes

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

one of my worst writing sins is abusing my power to create compound words. i cannot write the sentence "The sun shone as bright as honey that afternoon." no. that's boring. "The sun was honey-bright that afternoon" however? yes. that sentence is dope as fuck. i do not care if "honey-bright" is a word in the english dictionary. i do not care if the sentence is grammatically correct. i will not change. i will not correct my erred ways. the laws of the english language are mine.

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

so like. on the one hand. i discovered a few years ago that Margins in Notebooks are Loadbearing For Me, in that i need space to go off the rails when i ADHD my way into Great Ideas After the fact.

but. on the other hand:

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

So cool to see the growth!

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

not to be "comment on fanfic even if they are oooold"

But I just read a pretty good fic published in 2014-2015 (you know, roughly TEN YEARS AGO) and I was like, damn this is so cool, I have to leave a comment, even if you know, they probably wont see it...

The author replied less than an hour later.

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

Hey, don’t cry. Free online database of Japanese folk lore

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

when your art program’s closing message hits you straight in the heart and makes you stop and contemplate the state of it all

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

"superman knows everyone's secret identity because he can see through masks and eavesdrop anywhere, batman knows everyone's secret identity because he's the world's greatest detective, and wonder woman knows everyone's secret identity because she has a magic lasso" is fine and all but i think it's funnier if clark makes an active effort not to look through masks because he thinks it's rude, bruce knows despite making no effort because they're all actually terrible at keeping secrets, and whenever diana wants to know someone's identity she just asks bruce and it never occurs to him not to tell her

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

Why you should write healthy marriages:

1. They aren’t done enough.

2. They help other people understand what a healthy relationship looks like.

3. Fights can last for weeks and still be part of a healthy marriage.

4. Stereotypes. Break all the marriage stereotypes.

5. Soft cute couple moments DON’T stop after marriage.

6. Marriage is completely independent of character arcs. Those two individuals with trauma will still be two individuals with trauma but with gold rings.

7. A healthy marriage is one where people understand that their partners have baggage/trauma/flaws, but love them even in rough patches. 

8. It isn’t that healthy marriages aren’t compelling, it’s that people don’t know how to write marriages correctly. 

9. Marriages being an end goal often perpetuates that women are trophies to be won.

10. Marriages being an end goal often perpetuates that someone’s “freedom” ends there. Bury this trope, please, I beg of you.

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

Due to popular demand, here are versions for "I wanna draw" AND "I wanna write" Bingo cards for 2025!!! 🥰❤️

✍️fill it with your art goals (what drawings you want to make this year, what do you want to practice - what writing goals you want to reach)

🥇for every bingo you get you're entitled to a treat 🏆for scoring all fields you're entitled to a big treat!

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

One area where I feel like ACD's Holmes differs from modern interpretations is the degree of Holmes' lack of empathy. He is certainly eccentric, single-minded and arrogant in the books, but he does not come across as uncaring or unkind.

To me it seems that in modern characterisations (including fanfiction), he often comes across as if he doesn't understand other people's emotions, or has no regard for them. But this is not at all true in the books.

Just as an example, in "The Sign of the Four" he asks Watson if he's up for a six-mile track, and even after Watson confirms, Holmes asks again if it might give Watson's injured leg any trouble. There are also other examples where he does display appropriate empathy when speaking to an upset client, and so on. The characterisation is more nuanced here.

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

In the meantime, a whole plot bundle has come together

Fen of Serech

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

i met one of my aunt's archaeologist friends/colleagues earlier today & he was telling me about legends that not too far from here there's the ghosts of a roman legion that people see walking up the cliff towards the edge of the sea and then off the edge of the cliff and onwards, because the coastline has receded so much since roman times that the 'land' they're used to walking on goes on far past the point it falls into the sea today. and like. OUGH. I don't even strictly believe in that type of ghost but I'm Obsessed with this image of them still interacting with landscape that has crumbled into the sea & completely disappeared over the thousands of years since they were alive. ghost landscapes Real

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

Listen, everyone likes to clown on their own old writing for being cringe and bad. And it might not be good quality, but writing quality is something that can be fixed.

My own writing from when I was a teenager is by no means bad - it is unedited (or poorly edited), and it is earnest. Too earnest, maybe.

No, the main flaw with my early writing was that I hadn't read enough. I tried to write a vampire story when I had only read Twilight, and before I had read Dracula or Carmilla or IwtV. My work failed to pay appropriate homage to the works that had come before. It was earnest in the sense that I thought I was writing the most original, most edgy story of all time.

This isn't to say that you need to read every important piece in the genre you're writing before you write something. It's probably good to eventually do so, at some point in the drafting process, but you can't read everything. It's saying that your writing improves naturally as you read more, and experience more, and watch more. Teenage writing isn't bad, it's undiluted.

[kajsa-writes-sometimes]

AM radio is like literal magic. There is music all around us that we can't hear, and to hear it you just have to tap a crystal (diode) to the earth and listen to it with another magic rock (magnet) and a tin can. You dont even need electricity to make it work because this music around us is literally all the power you need. Oh and at night when the sun has set, the light of the day gets replaced by MORE music because the signals can travel further at night. This is magic. If you even care.