orelsemystery

[orelsemystery]

This is it--the last chapter. If you've been reading along, thank you so much; I appreciate it, and would love to hear from you, and to learn about any cool projects you're doing!

You can now read the whole novel all at once, so it's a good time to start if you've been waiting to do so. (: The first chapter is here.

The future of the project includes zines, and more blog posts, and probably some form of ebook. I'll keep you posted.

Much love--hope you're hanging in there.

-Miranda

[orelsemystery]

Read chapter 38 here. Next week's update is the last chapter!

[orelsemystery]

read it here!!

[orelsemystery]

Read ch. 36 here. ONLY A FEW MORE LEFT!!

[orelsemystery]

Read ch. 35 here.

[orelsemystery]

Just so bad, you guys.

Read ch. 34 here.

[orelsemystery]

Read ch. 33 here. It's for all the Holmes/Watson lovers out there <3

Charles pauses and turns back to look at the door. Cheap wood; a flimsy doorknob with a small keyhole. Maybe it’s a storage closet. That’s what Charles had always thought. Maybe inside that storage closet, amongst old files and tubes of lipstick and a dusty broom, is a box or two of books.

With a sense of illicit curiosity, he rattles the doorknob. Still locked. He bites his lip, thinking.

If it had been any other book—but Julian has always expressed disdain for detective fiction, for Holmes in particular. Despite this, he seems to know a lot about the Holmes canon; despite this, he keeps a copy of it in his closet.

Charles sweeps his hand along the top of the doorframe. A key falls to the ground. Heart giving a sudden jump, he bends to picks it up. It’s pretty clean; his fingertips are dusty from the doorframe, but the key itself, though cheap and not new, isn’t grimy. He tells himself to put it back. Instead, blood rushing in his ears, he slides it into the lock and turns it.

The door opens. It’s not a closet. It’s a small room, about the same size as Julian’s office. At first he thinks it is in fact another office: there’s a desk by the back wall. It’s a small desk, though, not quite full-sized, and it looks, Charles thinks, weirdly familiar.

His heart stops. 

[orelsemystery]

Chapter 32 is here.

 Strategy meetings and hushed conversations and secrets, years and years of them, years and years of living on a tightrope, living in crisis—and Jack’s body bleeding all over the floor, and Lu’s bed empty, and all the rest of it pales, all the rest of it turns inside out and—how had it taken Piper so long to see it?—it is hollow. There is nothing there.

[orelsemystery]

Read ch. 31 now. It's not a good day for detective lovers with big imaginations and sensitive hearts.

[orelsemystery]

Read ch. 30 here.

Sometimes you solve a clue with the detective you were obsessed with when he was on TV as a kid and are now working for and it's exciting. Like, really exciting.

[orelsemystery]

No gay angst here. Why would you even think that?

[orelsemystery]

I've been soooo absent on this blog recently! Apologies; it's the end of the semester and I've been very busy. But if you're in Pittsburgh, tonight I'll be giving a talk entitled "Taylor Swift and the Curious Case of Curious Time" for the Carnegie Science Center's 21+ night, which is themed "Swiftie Science" this month. A little bit of a departure from the Or Else content, but don't worry, it is still deeply invested in the intensity of memory, the weight of time, and the pull of longing. Just with more glitter. <3

[orelsemystery]

It's all a fun-and-games mystery until it's not.

Read chapter 28 here.

[orelsemystery]

I am a WHORE for “the love is requited, they’re both just idiots”

[orelsemystery]

sometimes a theme recurs in your work without your permission. and sometimes it reaches a threshold where you're like. well now i think this is saying something about me against my will. don't know what though

[orelsemystery]

I drew some little Sherlock Holmes dancing men for this one. Read ch. 27 here.

[orelsemystery]

A woman sits in the lower righthand corner of the frame, her hands on her lap. She is enveloped in a net, which pools at her feet and which is suspended by two long white threads extending upwards past the top right corner of the photograph. Under the net she appears composed or, maybe, simply posed. She stares just past the camera, her eyes—dark dots in the pale oval of her face—pointing at something that we, the viewers, cannot see. Or pointing at nothing.

The net makes D’Espérance ghostly: it falls over her body not unlike the way draped fabric swoops over the heads and bodies of the spirits who show up in photographs of séances. The grey-white crosshatching of the threads sinks into the grey-white background of her skin and blurs her facial features—her nose invisible, her mouth a smudge of darkness. And it obscures whatever scarf or shadow falls across her neck and torso, so that her head appears to float.

In a 2003 article in Art Journal, Mark Alice Durant describes “the blur of the otherworldly”: the tendency to associate the smudge, the haze, the vague shape with the not-quite-of-this-world—the spookification of the partially visible. Citing Victorian spirit photography, UFO images, and a set of blurry photographs supposedly produced by a man simply staring into the camera lens, Durant writes that “it seems that the visual proofs of paranormal activity must be conveyed in styles analogous to their tenuous accessibility” (14). That is, images meant to function as proof of the supernatural are often frustratingly vague or difficult to make out, which Durant argues is a manifestation of the difficulty of obtaining solid evidence of the paranormal. According to Durant, photography is particularly likely to produce such ambiguous proofs because it seems to hover between reality and representation, the material and the immaterial—“Black cloths and safe lights, apertures and sensitivities, filters and latent images: the glossary of photographic terms is suggestive of an entire world of betweenness” (8)

-Lu Fairchild's dissertation

Read chapter 26 here.