#Writer's Month

[writersmonth]

It's Badge Claims Time!

Finally, the time you have all been waiting for arrived! You've done a wonderful job, and everyone of you deserves a badge - but some of you did a CRAZY job and will get a personalized badge. The badge claim form is officially live!

You have two weeks - until September 22nd to fill it.

[joemerl]

Writer's Month 2024, Day 13: "Dark"

Poetry, for Tisha B'Av

The fire brightly burning extinguished holy light, In the opening hours of the millennial night. The first shone like the sun, the second like the moon; Countless stars have fallen, and others sent to doom. They go now into exile, to find the sacred sparks, With scrolls of black and white flame to fight against the dark. They cannot help but wonder, as they suffer and they pine, Do the blind ones even notice that the light no longer shines?

[pointwhitmark]

Writer's month

Oder

Ich kann euch wieder einen Monat mit meinen Ideen bewerfen. Wheee

[blueberry-ash]

Writer's Month 2024, Day 1 (‘creek’)

TKA Live Action, An Wenyi/Qiao Yifan. (Rated T for swearing? And, like, implied desire??)

It’s really too cold to be messing around in the water. Qiao Yifan’s mother would be horrified, and even An Wenyi is laughing in mild disapproval from the little wooden bridge. Qiao Yifan finishes unlacing his sneakers anyway. The creek is clear and lovely, with a bed of coloured pebbles, and water-dipped branches swaying all along the bank. Besides, Qiao Yifan hasn’t been hiking since he left school, and his body is unreasonably warm and sweaty—apparently, his regular gym routine counts for little in the face of an actual mountain.

Of course, some of the heat beneath Qiao Yifan’s collar might have more to do with the knowing way Luo Ji had glanced from An Wenyi to Qiao Yifan before heading off with some excuse about catching up with Steamed Bun and Chang Xian.

It definitely has something to do with the way An Wenyi’s hands and eyes have been lingering all weekend—have been lingering for a long time, really, but never with such wilful openness as now, and Qiao Yifan—

Qiao Yifan isn’t so ignorant of his own desires. He knows exactly what’s set his skin to sticky-heated fizzing.

The sight of An Wenyi’s lower arms—bare and handsome, with An Wenyi’s jacket taken off and slung around his hips, and An Wenyi’s sweater sleeves pushed up—is really just the final straw.

Doubly so, when An Wenyi casually crosses his arms upon the bridge’s handrail, looks over at Qiao Yifan, and smirks.

‘You’re going to freeze,’ An Wenyi says.

Qiao Yifan grins. The creek is unbelievably pretty, and An Wenyi is so beautifully smug. Qiao Yifan puts his socks in his shoes, and rolls up his jeans to his knees. He imagines striding through the water and reaching boldly; he imagines tugging An Wenyi down and forward—just a little, just a bit—just enough to lean up and catch An Wenyi’s smirk with a kiss.

In reality, Qiao Yifan yelps when his feet hit the water and the colds hits him. It’s punchy enough to smack the air from his lungs, just for a second, and then he’s gasping and giggling, and striding through the water with childish, stomping kicks—not to steal a kiss but to see whether movement will make the icy temperature any less wretched. (It doesn’t.) His feet are uncomfortably numb by the time he’s reached the bridge, and his legs aren’t much better, and maybe that’s why he drags himself up onto the railing, laughing and breathless, while An Wenyi huffs and plants a blocking palm across the middle of Qiao Yifan’s face.

Qiao Yifan rests the dead weight of his feet on barely warm timber. He grins with teeth at the searing heat of An Wenyi’s hand. ‘It’s fucking freezing. Let me up.’

‘Fuck off,’ An Wenyi laughs. He’s shaking off the water Qiao Yifan’s kicking has sprinkled across him. ‘You splashed me. You can get out the same way you got in, no bridge for you.’

An Wenyi pushes his hand against Qiao Yifan’s face like they’re school kids. For a second, Qiao Yifan thinks about blowing an obnoxiously wet raspberry in retaliation. Then Qiao Yifan shifts his face stubbornly, cool lips against warm palm, and immediately he’s back to grown-up and wanting.

Qiao Yifan says, speech against skin, ‘I could bite you.’

Qiao Yifan can’t really see An Wenyi, not with An Wenyi’s hand in the way; still, he can hear the gratifying little noise An Wenyi makes. He can hear the return of An Wenyi’s smirk, too, when An Wenyi presses a little closer and asks, ‘Just to be clear… was that a threat or an incentive?’

Qiao Yifan grins. He feels like kicking again. He feels like laughing and reaching and being bold. He feels like the shift of An Wenyi’s hand is too intentional, too—that the way An Wenyi crooks his thumb down to brush at the corner of Qiao Yifan’s mouth is far too deliberate to dismiss.

Qiao Yifan touches his tongue between his dry lips. He catches his bottom lip—dampened and warm, and just as carefully deliberate—against the tip of An Wenyi’s thumb.

An Wenyi’s free hand settles in at the nape of Qiao Yifan’s neck and presses firmly. Qiao Yifan smirks and shivers. Qiao Yifan says, ‘Let me up and maybe I’ll show you.’

Qiao Yifan could pretend to be surprised by just how swiftly he goes from chilly to toasty once he’s got his back pressed up against the handrail and his smirk caught in a kiss, but—let’s be honest—it’s not really that surprising at all.

[daughterofhecata]

Bevor ichs vergesse, ihr kennt das Prozedere, den (hoffentlich) ganzen August findet ihr hier wieder tägliche Double Drabbles zu den Writer's Month Prompts!

[badassbutterfly1987]

Day 1: destiny

Danes + Holland, pre canon

“Amusing, isn’t it,” Athos remarked as he ran his fingers through dark hair. “That they really thought they were enough.”

“Indeed.” Astrid sipped from a blood-filled teacup. “Too soft to spill the necessary blood.”

The clench of the Antari’s jaw betrayed his rage. It would put Athos on the defensive if not for the Seal defanging him. A dangerous weapon who obeyed his will alone.

To think the last king pampered him so, letting him become docile.

Athos tugged the weapon’s hair, forcing him to bare his throat. “Whereas we are destined to make Makt powerful once again.

[autisticwriterblog]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Control (Video Game) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Casper Darling/Helen Marshall/Zachariah Trench Characters: Zachariah Trench, Helen Marshall, Casper Darling Additional Tags: Fluff and Smut, Polyamory, OT3, Threesome - F/M/M, Established Relationship, Pre-Canon, POV Zachariah Trench, Love, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Light Angst, Implied Sexual Content, Post-Coital Cuddling, Crying During Sex, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Sweet, writersmonth's Writer's Pride Month Bingo 2024, polyamships' Polyam Shipping Days, Triple Drabble Series: Part 10 of Polyam Shipping Days, Part 1 of Pride Month Bingo 2024, Part 219 of Polyamory Fics, Part 78 of Into the Remedyverse Summary: Zachariah often struggles with his mood. But thanks to Helen and Casper and the love they show him, he manages to feel happy again.

Written for June’s Polyam Shipping Day. @polyamships

Pride Month Bingo prompt: Happiness. @writersmonth​

My bingo card is under the cut.

[thatrandomblogsays]

I’m so happy for them

[Image Description: Castiel from Supernatural is saying I love you, underneath is an image of Dean Winchester with the caption: “After four months of striking the WGA has a reached a tentative agreement & finalizing the contract. If all goes well writers will get to return to work with better pay and protections. They did it. Go unions”]

(Source)

[loveelizabeths]

love elizabeth s.

[zackprincebooks]

Me waking up: I want to write

Me eating breakfast: I want to write

Me getting ready for work: I want to write

Me at work: I want to write

Me eating lunch: I want to write

Me driving home: I want to write

Me at home, sitting in front of my laptop:

[writersmonth]

Day 31: Double | Beach

Important links: Rules | FAQ | AO3 Collection | Discord Server

[joemerl]

Writer's Month 2024, Day 23: "Lost"

Fandom: Harry Potter Status/Word count: An incomplete bit that I'll expand on later. 302 words.

"The Malfoys never lose."

It was something that Lucius heard ever since he was a child. The first time that he could remember was when he was about six, and learned that his father had quit his job as an advisor to the Minister for Magic.

"But why?" he asked. "I thought it was really important."

"Because Ignatius Tuft is an idiot," Abraxas said baldly. "Doesn't have half of his mother's brains, and soon he'll only have a quarter of her popularity. Mark my words, Lucius," he said, leaning forward and shaking his finger. "If Tuft gets reelected, I'll eat my hat."

Sure enough, the Minister was forced out of office before his term was even finished. "And not just him," his father noted at the breakfast table, folding his issue of the Daily Prophet. "Half of his cabinet members are disgraced as well. Look at Tullia McPherson. If you had asked anyone a few years ago, they would have said that she was an obvious choice to become the next Minister for Magic. But she decided to back up all of Tuft's fool ideas, and now she couldn't get elected if she Confunded half the voters. Meanwhile, I can step right back into politics and get cozy with Tuft's replacement. Let this be a lesson, Lucius," Abraxas continued, leaning down to his son once again. "Do you know why the Malfoys have been so successful for nearly a thousand years?"

Lucius shook his head. 

"Because we do not aim for the top spot—that is the easiest place to fall from. And when we see someone else falling, we get out of the way, rather than trying to catch them. And that is why," he straightened up, dark eyes twinkling, "no matter what happens to anyone else, the Malfoys never lose."

[pointwhitmark]

I will fill all the remaining prompts with porn or crack my attempt at humor. No depths, no finesse, no more than three seconds of thinking.

[blueberry-ash]

Writer’s Month 2024, Day 4 (‘stage’)

TKA, Chu Yunxiu &/ Su Mucheng. A The Earth is Online fusion, except that this is, like, only 1500 words long and the worldbuilding fits the wordcount. Don't think about it too hard.

.

Don’t ask Chu Yunxiu whether the Earth going online at the climax of the Glory World Cup had been a good thing or a bad thing.

Well, it had been a nightmare, of course. How are any of them supposed to forget the horror of their in-game moves actualising into realness? The sudden burst of pain had been as impossible to process as the sight of their changed environment; and the weight of Chu Yunxiu’s hands, inexplicably raised in an Elementalist’s familiar casting pose, had been infinitely harder to comprehend than the blank expression on Li Xuan’s face as the white of his China Glory t-shirt had bloomed bright with blood.

(“Ding dong! The game ‘World Cup, Team Competition’ has been triggered. At 20:41 on August 6, players Team China and Team Russia have safely entered the game. The players have entered the sandbox, the game map is completed, the data is loaded…”)

Whether finding themselves abruptly in the game and bleeding had been more or less shocking than the Tower’s following explanation—who could say.

Nobody has talked about it in the three months since. Or—nobody has talked about it directly with Chu Yunxiu, anyway, unless her ambiguous little dialogues with Ye Xiu can be counted. It’s not as though there haven’t been frantically hushed little conversations as the members of their fractured group have parted ways, and played, and won, and joined back up again to travel slowly eastward. And it’s hard to imagine the remaining tacticians, at the very least, not having seized those overlapping moments to stress and strategize. Still, Chu Yunxiu has wanted no part of it. It’s considerably better not to think, Chu Yunxiu has decided.

At least—it’s better not to give her mind the chance to dredge up the things it wants to dwell on, anyway.

Bad enough to be plagued by them at night, at rest, in these brief moments of anxious, uncertain quiet.

(Her home.) (Why it was only Teams China and Russia vanished from the world’s gaze—Yu Wenzhou had been told everything from an outside perspective, later, by a shaken stadium employee—and brute-forced into a Tower Game during the Black Tower’s first announcement, when everyone else had been given three days to play or not.) (Her parents.) (“Ding dong! 498.16 million players successfully loaded the game…”) (Her teammates.) (“There are four ways to enter the Black Tower, and this results in four types of identities: pro players, official players, reserve players, and stowaways. Guess which the Tower hates the most!”) (Club Misty Rain’s silly orange kitten.) (“Ding dong! China District 5’s pro player Han Wenqing and official player Lin Jingyan have successfully cleared the first floor of the Black Tower!”) (Her friends.) (“All players, please work hard to attack the Tower!”)

(What it means, what it means, what it means—)

She’d once heard Fang Rui wonder whether it would have been better to have been back home when it had begun, or even to have never played Glory at all. He’d been concussed at the time, though he’d still held a knife flat across one knee. He’d asked Su Mucheng what she’d thought, and Su Mucheng had said nothing, only looked toward Chu Yunxiu. Chu Yunxiu had looked away.

Who could afford to imagine it—to have been on a regular summer break, and at home with her family. Or to have never played Glory at all—to have been one of the faceless sea of Chinese noobs pulled into a first floor level dungeon when Han Wenqing and Lin Jingyan had opened the Tower’s first floor; to have been ignorant and unskilled and perhaps very swiftly freed from all of it.

Fang Rui had only said it the once, and nobody had answered, but Chu Yunxiu had known—well.

It would have certainly been easier, at least.

But then—

But then Su Mucheng is shifting against Chu Yunxiu’s thigh, her sleeping face swiping drool across the bare skin of Chu Yunxiu’s leg, her fingernails flexing and scraping against the rough hairs on Chu Yunxiu’s calves.

‘Yunxiu,’ Su Mucheng mumbles, the tone of someone speaking from within a bad dream.

Chu Yunxiu rests a hand against Su Mucheng’s head, petting gently.

On the other side of the café, she can just make out the back-and-forth rock of one of Huang Shaotian’s drawn-up knees. The rest of him is still and silent, a careful pillow for his captain’s bruised face. She wonders whether he’s just as awake as she is, or whether his limbs crave movement even when he’s sleeping.

‘Brother,’ Su Mucheng sighs.

At Chu Yunxiu’s other side, Ye Xiu shifts in his sleep in unconscious response.

‘It’s okay,’ Chu Yunxiu soothes both of them. ‘It’s okay. Go back to sleep.’

It’s a lie, of course. Yesterday’s dungeon was hellish, and the next will be too. Chu Yunxiu feels that the lie still matters, though, even here in the looted mess of some Czech café. Or—especially here, probably. So long as there’s still someone to whisper it to, Chu Yunxiu figures. So long as there’s Su Mucheng, and—

Don’t ask Chu Yunxiu what she might have chosen, what she might have traded, if the Black Tower had forced her to pick between anything else and Su Mucheng. Don’t you fucking dare to even think about it.

Perhaps that’s the true silver lining to their World Cup championships having been taken and warped. Perhaps that’s the almost-bright-side coming out to glint dully beneath the stains of blood and loss and grief: the fact that Chu Yunxiu hadn’t been given a choice.

None of them had, not really. Not there. Not with the frozen burn of Chu Yunxiu’s ice turning real, and the harsh crack of Wang Jiexi crashing-tumbling-stumbling down beside her. Not with the Russian national team just as shaken and confused—just as unwilling to continue the match until the Black Tower’s rules had made themselves inarguably, explicitly, violently clear.

‘We could have been in the regular season,’ Ye Xiu had said quietly, after, when people’s tears had begun to fall. ‘We could have been at home, facing each other.’

(Ye Xiu had been crying, too. Chu Yunxiu had seen the dirty tracks of it before he’d swiped his knuckles across his face. She’d seen the salt amongst the blood and she’d seen his hands shaking.) (She’d seen the way he’d hesitated, earlier, silent and frozen when the Black Tower had abruptly offered him up like some kind of sixth player—a substitute for the fallen Li Xuan, it had said, and offered the Russians two more for balance. She’d seen the way he’d only burst into motion after he’d looked toward Su Mucheng and seen the trickle of blood along her cheek.)

Team China’s players had won, in the end. They’ve kept on winning, buffered by a kind of blank relief at finding themselves mostly in relatively straightforward dungeons, or having stepped accidentally into quests, and all of it horrifying but nothing so unforgivable as what they’d done that day in Zurich.

Better not to think about the Russian players.

Better not to think at all.

Su Mucheng sighs, and snuffles, and shifts around again.

Chu Yunxiu keeps petting, stroking her fingers through Su Mucheng’s short-cropped hair until her breathing steadies out.

Ye Xiu's shoulder digs against Chu Yunxiu's. The point of Ye Xiu’s umbrella—(“Pro player Ye Xiu has cleared the game and obtained the reward ‘Tower’s Manifestations Umbrella’ and ‘Trophy’s Grudge’…”)—scrapes across the cafe’s floor as he tightens his grip subconsciously.

He’ll be awake first, Chu Yunxiu knows. He’ll wake, and he’ll yawn, and he’ll dig out a cigarette for Chu Yunxiu to share. Maybe they’ll talk in low voices about the day ahead, or the nearby dungeon they’ve been avoiding, but, either way, there’ll be less talking than smoking.

Ye Xiu gets it, Chu Yunxiu knows. Ye Xiu understands there’s only one win condition that really matters, and if Ye Xiu’s definition is somewhat broader than Chu Yunxiu’s, well—the heart of it, for both of them, is still drooling in her sleep against Chu Yunxiu’s thigh.

Apply your brain, yes, but there’s really no room for overthinking.

And if other players have been surprised—Chu Yunxiu has noticed, unable to always hide the ironic twitching of her mouth—to discover that she isn’t at all the kind of person they should be relieved to be opposing, well—

It’s not as though Chu Yunxiu hadn’t been accustomed to that already.

Let them smirk across a mini game, when someone randomly recognises her. Let them murmur that she’d only ranked pro because boobs, because her team had carried her, because her Club had made money with her face on cosmetics.

Let them go ahead and die already.

Chu Yunxiu doesn’t plan to.

[daughterofhecata]

Btw, da wir ja wieder August haben, ihr findet jetzt wieder jeden Tag ein Drabble (oder vielmehr, ein Double Drabble, dieses Jahr) zum entsprechenden @writersmonth Prompt entweder hier auf ao3 oder hier auf ff.de!

[badassbutterfly1987]

Day 8: castle

Holland+Nasi, pre book 2

He wandered the empty castle like a ghost. His footsteps echoed on the marble floor.

No more Danes. No more empty-eyed guards. No more Soul Seal. Alone except for the Thing weighing heavy against the back of his head.

He slumped against a wall, heavy with exhaustion. This had been home once. It had not felt like home in years.

He should find a room to rest. He could do so freely now. Makt’s well-being could wait until he didn’t feel like a walking corpse. He needed to get the filth of a dead world off his skin.

The pitter-patter of small feet drew his attention, hand drifting to his weapon.

It was only the kitchen girl, a small silent creature, peeking out from a corner. They had lived in the same castle, trapped with the same monsters. When had he last spoken to her? She darted away.

Nasi, he recalled. Her name is Nasi.

Minutes or hours later, she returned with a quilt. Slow steps forward as if he were a skittish dog and not a demon.

They didn’t speak as she handed over the blanket. She watched him with cautious eyes as she sat against the opposite wall.

Holland had been rebellious once, looking for loopholes with the Soul Seal. The drive for it burned away when Athos made an off-hand comment wondering how much pain a small child could handle before breaking.

The monsters could not hurt either of them now; nothing would hurt them again. The castle would be filled with kinder things soon.