#fiction tag

[airitree]

I wrote/illustrated/hand bound a fantasy book for my final senior thesis!

Click HERE for the link to read a chapter 1 preview! And check out my "#lamb at arms tag" to browse related art ;-)

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"Lamb at Arms" is an illustrated fantasy novel, featuring a world populated by beastfolk and animal giants, after humans mysteriously vanished into nothingness. The story focuses on a lamb knight who was born from an ageless Eden paradise, hoisted into the real world to track down a lost serpent."

Disclaimer: Not a published book, but will I attempt to shop it around? Yes.

[azuremist]

“Just make an OC at that point” No. I will continue to warp all of your favorite characters to suit whatever I want.

[morallygay]

nooo don’t betray your own moral code and rewrite history to save me you’re gonna make the audience think we’re gay haha

[soul-struck]

oh, because love is like that feeling i get in my ribs after drinking black coffee and forgetting to eat, a fluttering in my chest, in my fingers, the shortness of breath when i stand up and that strange weakness in my legs. why is love always pain and forgetting for me. i wish i could love like my brother, like buying birthday cards and keychains and necklaces, why can't i love like love isn't pain to me?

and, oh my god, you think i'm being so overdramatic when i tell you this, but you don't understand. someone once told me that i fall in love with any kindness someone shows to me, because once i fell off my bike and i didnt cry because i thought it didnt hurt that bad, but when a stranger offered me bandages and antiseptic, i started sobbing.

im so terribly unequipped to fall in love it sickens me. because i enjoy storms and lately it rains with the sun still out and i hate it because it feels all wrong.

[lepertamar]

hypocritical characters who state beliefs and values that are contradicted by their own actions or backstory........this is soooo very common/predictable/passé in the construction of 'i believe in [cool value] [acts heinously]' that i'm not interested in it, and 'i believe in [heinous idea] [acts coolly]' is not very far behind it in terms of played-out-ness at least in the subgenre of writing that includes fanfiction with eg woobie adjacent tropes? but a more morally neutral/lateral sort of thing of 'i believe [x][behaves in y manner or exhibits y traits or y experiences that contradict x]', where both x and y are technically morally neutral but this character has unpredictable deeprooted personal reasons for why they are attaching so much weight to x, is...........so sooooooo ripe..........

[pyroinfusedtiger]

Posting this everywhere til im not obsessed with it anymore

[azuremist]

It’s a little crazy to me that “it’s up to interpretation” is seen as a disappointing (or even negative!) response to ships / fanon these days by authors.

“The author said she doesn’t mind what the fans say, she must have felt so awkward and hated the question!!” I remember certain writers being like if you think my characters are gay then you’re stupid and should die

[morallygay]

[ID: 2 versions of the meme of a tiktok caption that reads "he would not fucking say that" edited to read "they would not fucking have kids" and "they would not fucking start a family" /end ID]

are we still doing this because i have a late submission

[morallygay]

I love those stories where instead of strongly identifying with 1 or 2 characters in particular, I can see various —but just as deep and intense— pieces of myself scattered across the whole cast

[soul-struck]

that place where we’re half asleep and half awake is when we can glimpse the afterlife, i think. i can hear you laughing in the living room, and i realise i havent heard you laugh like that in years.

im still asleep, i can feel the blanket over my shoulders, my eyes are closed, but im thinking about that one quote about how you can replace a lover, a friend, but you cant ever replace a brother.

when i was deeply sad, when i was taking ice cold showers in the winter to feel something, it was only the thought of losing you that i was afraid of. and even though im still asleep, i wish i could keep hearing you laugh like that for eternity.

i hope when my life ends, i hope death is when i finally wake up and join you in the living room, and drink energy drinks with you that our mom hates while playing video games together for hours like we did when we were children.

i hope that i can live an eternity in our memories, in me hugging you everytime you came home from college at 1am at the airport while it poured rain outside, in holding your hand when you cried after your fiance broke up with you, in the late night talks over facetime about our lives which were the only spots of light in the darkness that was my life for many, many years.

i was never afraid of death. because i knew that whichever one of us died first, we would wait for the other. we would wait for each other, before facing whatever comes after, my dearest older brother.

[beepboopappreciation]

Is this anything

[morallygay]

[ID: tumblr tag by @kkomaism that reads:

#literally like a base-boosted version of 'did it hurt? when I told you to look it up and I was right?'

/end ID]

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[daisywords]

One of my biggest nitpicks in fiction concerns the feeding of babies. Mothers dying during/shortly after childbirth or the baby being separated form the mother shortly after birth is pretty common in fiction. It is/was also common enough in real life, which is why I think a lot of writers/readers don't think too hard about this. however. Historically, the only reason the vast majority of babies survived being separated from their mother was because there was at least one other woman around to breastfeed them. Before modern formula, yes, people did use other substitutes, but they were rarely, if ever, nutritionally sufficient.

Newborns can't eat adult food. They can't really survive on animal milk. If your story takes place in a world before/without formula, a baby separated from its mother is going to either be nursed by someone else, or starve.

It doesn't have to be a huge plot point, but idk at least don't explicitly describe the situation as excluding the possibility of a wetnurse. "The father or the great grandmother or the neighbor man or the older sibling took and raised the baby completely alone in a cave for a year." Nope. That baby is dead I'm sorry. "The baby was kidnapped shortly after birth by a wizard and hidden away in a secret tower" um quick question was the wizard lactating? "The mother refused to see or touch her child after birth so the baby was left to the care of the ailing grandfather" the grandfather who made the necessary arrangements with women in the neighborhood, right? right? OR THAT GREAT OFFENDER "A newborn baby was left on the doorstep and they brought it in and took care of it no issues" What Are You Going to Feed That Baby. Hello?

Like. It's not impossible, but arrangements are going to have to be made. There are some logistics.

[dazzelmethat]

Cricket Cat concept. Do you see it? Do you see my vision? I don't think they'd purr or meow, just chirp with their wings.

[morallygay]

I mean it is a problem that in fandom fans often exclude female characters for the sake of male ones. Misogyny is a thing and it’s present in fandom spaces.

But that’s.. unrelated to the question of there being x amount of m/m works vs f/f works on ao3. The first option is absolutely right too. The manipulative guilt-tripping based on a false dichotomy of this post is honestly disgusting.

It doesn’t please me that there are 6x as many m/m works as f/f works. I wish it was more equal. I wish wlw had more. I feel the poller’s frustration but this doesn’t solve anything because it isn’t the problem, you’re just attacking laterally for no reason.

But on an individual level, it’s not a personal moral failing to have a preference for m/m over f/f. And it’s not their fault or responsibility if they are more numerous than ppl with a preference for f/f in those spaces.

We can talk about misogyny in fandom based on male vs female characters in non-ship fanfiction! There’s bound to be interesting and actually meaningful stuff there. But using ship fanfiction to make this point is disingenuous. People don’t write/read predominantly m/m or f/f because they’re prejudiced towards one gender over the other, it’s because of their (morally neutral) personal preferences…

*This poll was submitted to us and we simply posted it so people could vote and discuss their opinions on the matter. If you’d like for us to ask the internet a question for you, feel free to drop the poll of your choice in our inbox and we’ll post them anonymously (for more info, please check our pinned post).