#idk how traditional publishing works

[sevenfists]

I've been reading your Sid/Geno fics and loving them, and then found your tumblr and was absolutely delighted to hear that you've written some profic as well (I have requested all of them from my library!) I'm sorry to hear your current WIP is giving you trouble, sending good vibes your way (and some hockey magic, if it is a hockey/hockey-adjacent work!)

Love to hear that you're getting them from the library!!! That's the entire reason I pulled them from Kindle Unlimited. Lol the WIP is unbearable MM sci-fi with at least three complicated subplots in addition to the main romance arc... my ambitions routinely exceed my talent. Someday I will figure out how to make all the pieces fit together.

[hanzajesthanza]

"the michael kandel translation of "the witcher" short story can't hurt you!!"

the michael kandel translation of "the witcher" short story:

[i2sunric]

𝐋𝐔𝐋𝐋𝐀𝐁𝐘 (s.jy)

PAIRING: horny!jake x succubus!reader (f)

SUMMARY: jake has always been an hyper sexual type boy, always seeking relief in the depth of night. but his hand isn't as satisfying anymore and neither are his toys, and in his moment of desperation, you appear like a gift sent from heaven (or hell).

WARNINGS: kinktober. succubus (a sexual demon), masturbating, pillow humping, riding, overstimulation, messy blow job, jake is kinda sub, doggy, missionary, unprotected sex (don't be silly, wrap your willy!), cream pie, dirty talking, manhandling, (idk if there’s a slight cnc?), slight choke kink, jake whines and whimpers (we like), cum eating, oral (m receiving), pussy licking, pet names (jakey, baby), lmk if more. NOT PROOFREAD.

PUBLISHED: 20th October 2024

WC: 2.9k

TAGLIST: (permanent) @stolasisyourparent @jaeyunsbimbo @jwnghyuns @bangtancultsposts @shawnyle @jooniesbears-blog @skzenhalove @ro-diaries @onlyhyunjin @xcosmi @strawberrhypen @heeheeswifey @destinyhoon @jakeflvrz @emislove @astratlantis @tunafishyfishylike @branchrkive @insommni4 @kirinaa08 @leiclerc @nxzz-skz @laurradoesloveu @beomluvrr @heeshlove (oneshot) @leov3rse @eileenville @roastandtoast @heeaxvhhoon @doublebunv @ancnymcnzjy @heartynoo @rii7eis7 @lyxnneee @yunahszx

a/n: i literally have 8 drafts for kinktober but i’m not sure i’ll be able to finish them all (sorry). i don’t even really like how this one came out but i thought i owned y’all some new fics since i’ve been ia for a while. please REBLOG to spread bcs only likes don’t take authors so far. thank you 🩷

Jake was resting on his bed, or so he tried to. His back was against the mattress, the only light illuminating the room was the one of the moon, entering from the window as if to peek to his desperation.

Fact was, he had been a painful hard on the whole day and fate wanted that he couldn’t seem to make himself come.

It was true when they said that as you overdo something, you grow tired of it, because his hand had stopped working a couple of weeks before, which led him to the sex shop downtown to purchase a couple of toys.

And they worked, for the following couple of days until the empty feeling after jerking off hadn’t come back.

“Ugh…” He muttered to himself, he was desperate at this point.

His entire body felt hot with arousal, the air around him getting stuffy. It was a wonder how his hand hadn’t fallen off from all the wanking he had done in the past week.

Jake was left with a raging bulge making fun of him through the fabric of his sweats, his cock so hard it was even painful to exist.

He grabbed his phone from off to the side, opening up the internet in hopes of finding something to satisfy his needs. He began scrolling on a pornography site, a small sigh escaping from his mouth as he quickly found something he liked.

It was a rather soft porn, just a ‘morning sex’ one, he skipped all the intro until it got to the good part.

Jake slowly pulled down his sweats, just enough to free his cock from the restraints of the clothing.

He hadn’t even worn his boxers to bed, feeling suffocated.

He raised the volume of the video, holding his phone with one hand while he started to touch himself with the other.

He was sensitive, slowly pumping his shaft up and down. As the moans of the video got louder and the boy fucked the girl harder into the mattress, he too tried to fast his pace— and nothing.

Jake continued his search, even going to the hidden pictures of his galleries where he kept screenshots of his favourite porns of all times.

Nothing seemed to work on him, nothing brought him enough pleasure to get him off.

Jake groaned loudly and threw his phone on the mattress, far away from him.

He stared at his cock as if it had personally offended him, it stood proud and angry red in front of him.

Suddenly, an idea flashed in his mind.

If hand didn’t work, and neither did the kinky toys he got, he’d have to try the traditional way of fucking a pillow.

He grabbed the pillow from behind his head and turned around, his chest now pressed onto the mattress.

Jake rested his head on the other, smaller pillow while he raised his backside, enough to make a makeshift hole of the pillow.

He inserted his aching cock and thrusted his hips, slowly. The fabric of the pillow touching his length made him moan softly. He tried to imagine someone being under him, someone letting him rut his cock inside of them.

Just as he focused on the small pleasure he got, a giggle made his eyes widen in surprise.

Peeking from behind his shoulder, he noticed a red figure.

“What—“ Jake turned around, covering his dignity with the pillow (as if he wasn’t just grinding on it). There was no way someone had entered his bedroom, or his house in general. He remembered he had locked all the doors before going to bed, so how did you get inside?

You stood in front of the bed, looking at him with a wide smile on your face. Your skin was reddish, and you had small horns on your head, as well as a tail moving left and right, as if you were amused by the scene you had just witnessed.

“Hey,” You purred, waving your hand at him “Having fun there?”

“Who are you?” He asked, moving into a sitting position “Or… what are you?”

Your body was barely covered by a brown top and a pair shorts of the same colour, making your curves and body perfectly visible.

Lord, if you weren’t such an arousing sight. Had he been in the right mind, and not clouded by lust, he would’ve realised you were a succubus.

A demon that got its power from having sex with desperate men in the middle of the night, taking strength by their semen. Your body was meant to make him horny.

“Don’t worry about it...” You raised a brow, as if to ask, him for his name.

Jake understood and cleared his throat “Jake.”

You smiled happily “Jake, what a pretty name for a pretty boy!” You exclaimed.

“I am Y/N.” You introduced yourself, placing a hand on your chest, clearly making his attention go to your tits.

He nodded in reply, his eyes ranking over your figure warily “So.. what are you?”

You just rolled your eyes. “It doesn’t matter, I’m here to help you.” You bit your bottom lip “Don’t hide from me.”

Jake glanced down at where the pillow was hiding his lower body and let out a shaky breath.

He debated whether to listen to you or try and get some more answers out of you— but you were so willingly giving your help to him, he couldn’t just refuse you. Not after he had waited for this moment so long.

Cautiously, he removed the pillow, showing his cock that sprang free.

Your eyes widened and your mouth watered. “Aren’t you huge?” You complimented, loving the way it throbbed at your comment.

Just the sight of your perfect body made some precum leak from the tip, and you knew he must’ve been so pent up he was suffering.

“You don’t have a pussy to bury your pretty cock in?” You purred, slowly crawling on the bed.

“N-no.” Jake replied.

“It’s okay,” You stated, slowly pumping his shaft “You can use mine.”

Just your mere touch made his mind grow foggy, your pretty palm wrapped around his length.

He moaned softly as you spat on it, using your saliva to lubricate the skin.

Jake’s eyes fluttered shut, it just felt so good to finally be touched by something that wasn’t his own hand, and he whimpered when your mouth wrapped around him.

It was so warm and it felt so good, the way you slowly moved up and down, bobbing your head to pleasure him.

Without even him realising, his hand had moved to your hair, grasping your locks as he thrusted upwards.

In a way, you liked how desperate he was. Your power was lowering the past few days and he was just what you needed— a horny college student in desperate need of filling some nice pussy.

Oh, if only he knew your true intentions.

His hips began to move as he held you still, fucking your mouth like you were a flesh light. Though you felt even better.

You gagged around his length and the sound only fuelled his contorted desires. “Mh— fuck.” He moaned, his hips snapping back and forth “So good,” Jake breathed out “So fucking good.”

You decided to hollow your cheeks and let him use you, one of your hands moving inside your panties to lazily circle your clit. You were already dripping wet, while he was leaking precum inside your mouth, filling your taste buds with a bittersweet taste.

“I’m so close, M’gonna— Oh!” He groaned loudly as he shot his thick load down your throat, his cock pulsating inside your mouth as he pushed your head down further. You palmed his balls, just adding to the overwhelming pleasure he felt.

You could almost feel him whole down your throat, you frowned as you tried your best not to gag around it.

After a couple of seconds, he let you go, his breath heavy as he tried to regain strength.

You pulled away and licked your lips, loving the sweet taste of his cum.

And as you looked down, you noticed he was already hard. You widened your eyes, a smirk forming on your lips.

But Jake wasn’t as lust-high as he had been when you found him humping his night pillow, and he sat up properly.

With one swift movement he grabbed your throat, making sure not to squeeze it too tight and he pressed his plump lips on yours.

As surprised as you were, you quickly recovered and reciprocated the kiss, teeth crashing and tongues swiping one on the other.

His free hand snuck between your thighs, feeling your wetness, making him swallow your moan.

“So wet for me, mh?” Jake murmured on your lips, helping you out of your tight shorts “Let me give you back your favours.”

You felt his finger press against your entrance but you stopped him. You certainly didn’t need any prepping, the only thing you needed was him shooting his cum deep inside of you.

But that, he didn’t need to know, so you just whined “Need you inside of me Jakey, please.”

“Yeah?” He retrieved his hand, manhandling you into the mattress. He crashed your head on the pillow - yes, the one he was fucking just a few minutes before - and held your ass up.

It was cute how he thought he was in charge, but you didn’t mind being dominated, so you let him be.

He opened your asscheeks with his slender fingers and licked a long stripe out of your folds, making you moan.

“Hurry,” You pressed your backside further into his face, making Jake slap your asscheek.

Had your skin not been already red, his slap would’ve left an angry mark. But you liked it, so you pressed your ass against him again.

Jake groaned, slapping the same asscheek that left a burning sensation cursing through your body.

He moved up, quickly discarding his shirt and sweatpants, throwing them somewhere on the floor. “Want a condom?” You almost laughed at his question, reaching a hand to pull him close, you hissed “Give it to me raw.”

He felt himself grow even harder at your dirty talk, he pumped his shaft and pressed it against your clit, gathering all your sweet juices.

You hummed softly at the teasing, needing him to be inside of you, that thick cock to press against your cervix and making you see the heaven you weren’t allowed in.

With one quick thrust, Jake slammed all of himself inside of you, knocking the air out of your lungs.

It was true that you didn’t need any prepping, having done this for a living - literally - but you felt him whole, “S’deep.” You sighed.

Jake moaned at how your walls hugged him, squeezing any drop of precum, swallowing his full length.

He pulled out just to slam back inside, gripping your asscheeks. “Fuck,” He breathed out, his pace already quickening as he tried to chase both of your highs.

“You like it deep, baby?” He asked, “You like it feeling me so deep inside of ya?”

You nodded, reaching your hand behind to touch him, but Jake got ahold of your wrists and held both of them behind your back.

The position would’ve been uncomfortable if you weren’t so aroused, it’d been a while since you were fucked hard and Jake seemed like the best victim you had in ages.

“Pussy so good,” He grunted, eyes squeezing as he felt himself near the edge “So fucking perfect, baby.”

You tried to peek at him from behind your shoulder, and Jake noticed. He gave you a sly wink and let go of your wrists, pulling out of you to turn you around.

Your back was now on the mattress, the human spread your legs wide as he aligned with your entrance once again.

He positioned your legs on his shoulders and quickly got inside again, as if he were addicted to being in you, his balls slapped against your ass.

“Better, ain’t it?” You wrapped your arms around his neck, bringing him down to you to kiss his lips “I get to see your pretty face as I fill you up with my cum.” The angle you were bent was awkward but you didn’t really care.

The thought made you clench around him and Jake groaned in your mouth, his cock rutting fast and deep.

The squelching sound of skin slapping filled the room, for once Jake was glad of owning a house and not an apartment, or the neighbours would’ve had already come to complain.

He held your throat with his veiny hands, adding just the right amount of pressure to make you light-headed.

“Jakey,” You breathed out, mouth agape “Want your cum, give it to me.”

Your words only fuelled his desire, he sped his movements - if it was even possible - his face contorted in pleasure as he felt his orgasm approach.

“Yes, yes, M’gonna give it to you, baby,” He chanted out, his cock throbbing “Fuck— I’m gonna fill you up so good.”

He rested his forehead against your shoulder and squeezed your clothed breast, kneading at the soft flesh.

His movements became sloppy until with one last, deep thrust he came deep inside of you.

“Yes!” You breathed out, as his cum flooded inside of you, you could feel yourself growing stronger, your powers returning.

Jake’s movements grew slower until they stopped, his laboured breath tickled your skin.

He was tired, strangely so, he pulled out of you and laid beside you “Shit, this was the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

His eyes closed as exhaustion washed over him, but you weren’t done.

Oh, you were far from done.

First, you hadn’t come yet and second, you needed more of his semen.

You climbed on top of him, smiling at his fucked up state. He looked so pretty with messy hair, swollen lips and red cheeks.

Jake slowly opened his eyes, widening them a little as he took you in “Y/N? What are you— Fuck.”

He groaned loudly as you fisted his softened cock, wanting him to get hard again so you could ride him.

“S-stop.” He gripped your hand but you were stronger than him now, shoving it away “Shh, I’ll make you feel good, pinky promise.”

You chuckled within yourself, slowly grinding your wet pussy on his hardening length.

Jake sighed, his hands lazily holding your hips “You need to cum, baby?”

You hummed, your fingers grazing his happy trail “Mh… yes, will you make me?”

Jake nodded, his eyes half lidded “I can use my tongue, no need to…” He grunted as you lifted yourself and held his dick up, slowly lowering on him.

As you bottomed out, you moaned, the shadow of his bulge peeking through your stomach.

You threw your head back, his cock sliding in and out easily thanks to your wetness and his previous orgasm still lingering inside of you.

“M-too sensitive baby, please…” You chuckled, “You can take another one.”

His brows furrowed as you alternated between moving up and down and grinding him, his nails digging in the skin of your hips.

“So? Can you take another one, mh?” Jake sighed, nodding his head weakly “Y-yes.”

“Atta’ boy.” You exclaimed, rewarding him by riding him faster.

Jake felt all of your movements, the overwhelming sensation making his body rock with tremors “Can’t… can’t.”

“No, you can.” You grasped his shoulders and moved your hips almost frantically, your clit brushing against his skin.

His body tensed, his feet flexing and relaxing, “Fuck… I’m gonna cum again.”

You bit your bottom lip, feeling your climax reach as well “Mh… give it all to me, Jakey.”

His hands moved to your breasts as he squeezed them to the point of pain, you clenched around him and he snapped.

His cum shot inside of you, his cock throbbing painfully as he came for the third time of the night.

He whimpered when you didn’t stop, trying to move you away but you didn’t, you just kept moving until you saw white as well.

Your legs trembled as you reached your euphoria, while Jake’s body collapsed whole on the bed.

His eyes slowly closed, too tired to even stay awake. He slowly succumbed to sleeping.

You smiled victoriously, feeling your powers raise even more. Standing up, you let the remaining of his semen drop out of you and stretched.

Sighing contentedly, you reached for your discarded shorts and put them back on.

“I’m feeling so refreshed!” You smiled happily, but as you turned around you saw Jake’s slumped figure on the mattress.

Feeling pitiful, since he seemed so vulnerable, you covered his naked body with the blanket. Smiling at his face, you noticed he really was a pretty guy.

You leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss on his cheek, moving some hair out of his sticky forehead.

“See you soon, Jakey.” You smirked and disappeared, with the intention of coming back to him whenever you felt weak. Which, maybe would’ve happened more often.

[starsofjewels]

GREETINGS!! was wondering if you feel up for it if you could do a tyrion x autistic reader? idk how you could make autism fit into the GoT world but I always feel like an outsider even in the real world and i feel tyrion would be one of the few who'd actually be accepting and not judgemental

A Kitty Cat in the Lion’s Den

Tyrion Lannister x Autistic! Lannister! Reader

(Feat.) Tywin Lannister x Autistic! Lannister! Reader

CONTENT: Autistic meltdown, small! Mention of blood/ injury, self-deprecation, the Lannisters are their own warning

Word count: 1.5k (lil pookie bear)

· · ────── ·𖥸· ────── · ·

Hi, beautiful. I absolutely loved this request !! This was only semi triggering to write, and I hope you like it. <3

I’ve just started back at college, so the drip might be dry (not that it wasn’t to begin with). I may or may not have published this during a Free Study period…

This is proof I don’t just write Gregor Clegane fics. But I do love big squishy man and his cock.

I think I probably need to make a masterlist..

· · ────── ·𖥸· ────── · ·

(A teeny PSA before we begin- I, unsurprisingly given the shit I upload on here, am autistic. I’ve struggled with it my whole life, and this is an interpretation of my own experience with autism. ASD is, as the name suggests, a spectrum, so this can’t really be a generalised fic. I put my own personal experiences with my condition into this, so if you’re also autistic/ otherwise neurodivergent and this doesn’t fit your vibes, that’s why. I can’t really explain it any other way, so yeah, here you go.)

Your entire life has served as a reminder that, whether by your own fault or some cruel will of the Gods, you are not wanted. You are the outsider, the youngest Lannister, not beautiful enough to marry off young and, decidedly, not male. Lord Tywin is consistently busy with his duties as the Hand, Tyrion hides with his wines and his whores, and Jaime has his own place in the Red Keep. You are forced to sit with your sister and her ladies, who talk too loudly and prattle on about nonsense.

Cersei, you have long established, does not like you. You aren’t really sure anyone likes you, in the traditional sense, but you know that your sister only keeps you around for fear of Tywin’s wrath. There is something in the back of your mind that remembers a younger, softer Cersei putting you in her lap, of brushing your hair and putting it in gold bows. But, that was before. Before you could walk or talk properly, before you spouted random facts on unasked for topics, before she realised you were different.

Everyone knows you are different, and no one can explain why. Not even you. All they know is to stay away from you, all they know is they’ll never understand how your little mind works.

So, you sit as nicely as you can on the outside of Cersei’s circle of ladies, and you try to focus on your sewing. You don’t like sewing, but it’s what all of the noblewomen do to pass the time, and all you want is to fit in.

“Your sewing is coming on well, my lady.”

The septa tilts your sewing slightly to look at it just a little more. It’s supposed to be a gift for your father, and it is not good. You see every uneven stitch, all of the oddities and bumps in your work that make it so you can hardly look at it. You hate it, and you hate that you can’t even sew properly.

“The stitching is all wrong…”

She takes your hands as you try, again, to pick out your newest stitch, a learned behaviour with you. Despite being with you near your whole life, since you weaned off of your nurse, you aren’t sure the septa completely understands your fascination of perfection,

“It is fine,” Her voice is soft, but you can feel her disappointment, “you are still learning, my lady, some mistakes are natural. You do not need to pull it apart- again.”

You jump when Cersei’s ladies giggle at some joke you haven’t heard, the woman beside you takes your hand, and you are reminded why you keep her so close. At least, in some way, she understands what you like and what upsets you.

Tea is served for the ladies. They give you what Cersei likes, what her ladies eat, green and red things that squish and squelch in your mouth and taste like you’ve eaten rags. And the queen sees you push them around your plate, and scoffs.

“At least try it, sister,” She sips from her wine. You feel each of her noblewomen shift, in turn, to look at you, “a Lannister lady can’t just survive off of the children’s food you eat, we can’t all eat nothing but cakes and plain bread all day.”

But you don’t, and you starve. Tywin will get you something later, you’re sure of it, as he sighs, and gently suggests you’ll need a more varied diet if you’re to marry a good husband.

The women’s giggles practically turn to cackles, which do not stop for what feels like hours. You wish they’d stop, or that you could understand what they find so utterly hilarious, so at least you may join their hysteria. You’ve put your sewing down in your lap, and you fiddle with your hair. The sept doesn’t like that, she guides your work back into your hands.

“Your father doesn’t like it if you mess your hair, sweet girl, you know that,” Her hands find your hair, carefully untangling the knots you’ve made, “try a few more stitches.”

And then, inevitably, it happens. You prick your finger on your needle, and a soft ruby comes from your noble, incomprehensible skin.

Throwing your project to the ground, you rush off as fast as your legs can manage. No one comes to find you.

You are long practised with the subtle art of trying not to cry. You pace back and forth, away from anything and everything, your hands in your hair as you do. The tears in your eyes hurt, they make you tired, and only add to your humiliation. You can do nothing right, why can you do nothing right?

You think of your sister, of perfect, beautiful, poised Cersei- She has a gaggle of women to do her bidding she is loved, and desires and you doubt she paces the halls trying not to cry. She is the lion queen, and you are her kitty-cat of a sister.

And then, you hear your name called. Followed by hurried footsteps toward you. Tyrion takes your hands in his, but you cannot even look at him.

“Has someone upset you? Cersei?”

All you can do is give him whines in response. You feel a sob bubbling in your throat, and you cannot give him the satisfaction of seeing you weak.

“Tell me.”

So you look down, you watch his eyes change from confusion, to the pity you are so used to seeing. But he is your older brother, and you know he won’t run back to Cersei, like Jaime would.

It comes in one, huge splurge, as tears fall against your skin and ruin the pretty powders your maids spent so long putting on you this morning,

“I- Was making a gift for Father-” You gasp, “And they didn’t give me anything to eat, and- and the sewing was terrible, but Septa is lying and saying it’s good and-” Another. “And I cut myself!”

His arms wrap around you, and he puts his head against you. Though much smaller than you, it offers greater comfort than he knows it does. All you can do is sob. You feel like a child.

No words are spoken as he takes you down to the kitchens, and puts you at the staff table. You are given something you eat with relish, and get a plate of pudding for your effort. There is no need for you to have any medical attention for your injury, but he has it wrapped anyway. A psychological comfort, if nothing else.

Tyrion helps you into bed, letting you reach out for the rag dolls your sister claims you’re too old for. You want your father, you want him to go and tell off Cersei, but you have your brother instead, and he at least semi-understands what it’s like to be different.

“I’m sorry,” you turn and look up at him,

“Sorry?”

He stands, walking to your window to look out at the courtyard below.

“When you look at me, what do you see?”

Tyrion is going somewhere with this, you know that much, but what, you are left wondering,

“I see… my brother.”

“Yes, you do. But the world? What does the world see? They see a drunk, lustful little man with a lion on his chest he doesn’t deserve.”

Something in you knows that it’s true. Tyrion is nothing more than his condition to the eyes of most in the Keep, most of the kingdom.

“You, you look like a Lannister. Your brokenness is inside. And I wish I could understand it.”

“It’s alright-” You sit up, clutching your doll, “It’s just… what it is. I have you, I have Father.”

Tyrion almost scoffs, he comes back from the window, passing you your water,

“Yes, you get Father, but that’s because you are utterly adorable.”

“I am adorable, aren’t I?”

“And humble, it appears.”

When Tyrion leaves, he kisses your forehead, and you know he is going to tell Father. You are the one thing they share something of a common interest in, and you suspect Tywin will make an appearance at some point. You’re right, of course.

It is Tywin’s heartbeat you listen to to calm yourself down for sleep. Your father strokes your hair, half-dozing himself. A soft, sweet moment that you are reminded Tyrion doesn’t have the privilege of.

Cersei is no longer allowed to be your main caretaker, you spend your afternoons out in the gardens, or sit entertaining yourself in Tywin’s solar. Tyrion takes you on walks, and there is something of a peaceful normality brought about.

You are still terribly disappointed in how Tywin’s gift turns out, it looks like a child made it, and when you become obviously quite upset over the manner, you have the Old Lion and his younger son to calm you. He loves it, he assures you, and Tyrion is so enamoured by it he requests his own. You know they are simply making you feel better, but you let it happen anyway.

And, perhaps, life is not so bad after all.

[queerfables]

Taking away the glass?

Oh gosh I'm actually so keen to talk about this so thank you for the opening!

Context: Responding to akaitsukicat's artwork of Crowley and Aziraphale separated by a glass wall, I said that the reason we're all such wrecks over their kiss is because after 6000 years in canon and 33 years in real life, that kiss was "taking away the glass".

The glass is a metaphor that media scholar Henry Jenkins uses to explain the appeal of slash, originally published in 1993. Here, "slash" refers to queer re-interpretation of heterosexual media, including transformative works exploring those readings.

This is what Jenkins says about the glass:

When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies. Both of them are reaching out towards each other, their hands pressed hard against the glass, trying to establish physical contact. They both have so much they want to say and so little time to say it. Spock calls Kirk his friend, the fullest expression of their feelings anywhere in the series. Almost everyone who watches the scene feels the passion the two men share, the hunger for something more than what they are allowed. And, I tell my nonfan listeners, slash is what happens when you take away the glass. The glass, for me, is often more social than physical; the glass represents those aspects of traditional masculinity which prevent emotional expressiveness or physical intimacy between men, which block the possibility of true male friendship. Slash is what happens when you take away those barriers and imagine what a new kind of male friendship might look like. One of the most exciting things about slash is that it teaches us how to recognize the signs of emotional caring beneath all the masks by which traditional male culture seeks to repress or hide those feelings.

The vid I refer to, inspired by Jenkin's comments, is The Glass by thingswithwings. It's a beautiful vid, sad and hopeful and empowering, with a very moving commentary on fandom history. It was originally published in 2008, which is relevant to understanding the position it takes in the dialogue around queer relationships in media.

Here's thingswithwings' summary of the vid, as it appears on YouTube:

Henry Jenkins, speaking of the Spock death scene from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, said, "slash is what happens when you take away the glass." It has been said, in response, that death also happens when you take away the glass. ie, if you took away the glass Kirk would die of radiation poisoning too; the barrier between desiring men cannot be removed on pain of death. Homosexuality, or just loving touch between two people of the same gender, is equivalent to death in this media narrative. One of the interesting things about slash is the way it takes away the glass, then puts it back, then takes it away, then puts it back, often pleasurably. I think this is both problematic and powerful. It is problematic because it reasserts the impossibility of the touch (it fetishizes oppression in a negative manner); it is powerful - and good - because it dwells on and thinks about and removes the glass (it fetishizes oppression in a transformative manner). One of the interesting things about mainstream media is that it continues to put the glass back up, no matter how hard we try to tear it down. Queer desiring touches have been, and remain, imaginable but impossible. TL;DR ALTERNATE SUMMARY: THERE SEEMS TO BE SOME KIND OF INVISIBLE BARRIER IDK WHAT IT MIGHT BE

In regards to Good Omens, it's relevant that this entire conversation about homosocial relationships in media takes place within the 29 year period between the publication of Good Omens the book and the adaptation of the story to screen. The vid was created 15 years ago - which is to say 18 years after the book was published and 11 years before season 1 was released - and it talks about realised queer desire in mainstream media as being so impossible that it is equivalent to death. That is the kind of resistance that queer representation in pop culture has been up against, these last three decades.

Crowley/Aziraphale, as depicted in the book, is such a classic example of slash. I've seen some people who read the book in a contemporary context saying they didn't necessarily pick up on any subtext between the characters, and I suspect this is a mark of cultural expectations. Firstly, because the cultural references that the intentional subtext relies on have become obscured over time - see Neil Gaiman's explanation of the "consenting cycle repairmen" line. But more importantly because the audience's frame of reference for unintentional subtext has shifted, too. What is unsayable and which silences are emotionally loaded has changed over time. Even if you are intentionally using a queer lens in your reading, you might not see subtext in the same places that someone would even 10 years ago.

For example, take this passage from the book:

On the whole, neither [Aziraphale] nor Crowley would have chosen each other's company, but they were both men, or at least men-shaped creatures, of the world, and the Arrangement had worked to their advantage all this time. Besides, you grew accustomed to the only other face that had been around more or less consistently for six millennia.

On it's face, this line suggests that the relationship between the two of them is a matter of convenience more than desire. Maybe that's the intended reading and maybe that's how it started or how they justify their association to themselves, but taken together with how deeply they know each other and how they are always each other's first thought in a crisis, suddenly "neither would have chosen the other's company" sounds like an extremely British way to say they care about each other far more than they were supposed to. Plus, this is Aziraphale's take on their relationship, and it plays rather beautifully against Crowley's much simpler expression of the exact same sentiment:

Aziraphale. The Enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.

To go back to Henry Jenkin's wise words, what we're seeing here is Aziraphale thinking about Crowley through the glass - through the "aspects of traditional masculinity which prevent emotional expressiveness or physical intimacy between men". If you came up in slash fandom at a time when seeing queer relationships in canon was unthinkable, you probably find it easier to identify the gap between how Aziraphale thinks about his relationship with Crowley and how their relationship actually functions. That gap was where a lot of slash lived.

You might say that the book shows Crowley and Aziraphale watching each other through the glass, and season 1 is them pressing up against it. They're still prevented from showing the full depth of feeling between them, they still hunger for more than they're allowed, but they are reaching for it. We see the history of their relationship developing through the ages. The unsayable is still left unsaid, but we feel the weight of it in everything they do. They come so very close but they still can't cross that threshold.

And then there's season 2. Within the text, Crowley and Aziraphale are not just pressing against the glass, they're actively trying to dismantle it. They're searching for a door to the other side. They're inspecting for weak points where they could cut their way through. And then suddenly they're out of time and out of options and the glass is still between them, and there's nothing they can do.

As the audience, you feel that desperation. You feel that grief. And if you're someone who's been watching the glass go back up on every relationship you thought might stand a chance of tearing it down, it hits hard. You're longing vicariously with the characters, but you're longing for yourself too, to see queer desire made possible. To see queer touch made not just imaginable but real.

And then, with all hope lost, Crowley throws himself through the glass. It doesn't matter that it doesn't save them. They kiss and it changes everything. Queer desire is no longer up for debate. Queer touch is no longer impossible. They kiss and the glass shatters, entirely and irrevocably.

This is why it matters so much that they did kiss, even though the love between them was already undeniable. For thirty years, Crowley and Aziraphale were part of a media landscape that relentlessly reinforced the glass at every turn and flooded fatal radiation through any crack they couldn't fix. In a different context, that kiss would be less vital to affirming their relationship. But in the world we live in, with the specific history that this story has, I don't think anything else could have done what it did. The glass between these characters had been reinforced over decades, in a culture that made the barriers to open intimacy between men inescapable. Their kiss was what it took to break it.

And by shattering the glass, this story has fundamentally rewritten what is possible. It proves the rules preventing true affection between people of the same gender can be defied. Queer people are already becoming more visible in pop culture; we're no longer reliant on slash reimagining queer longing between heterosexual leads. But Crowley and Aziraphale's kiss is cathartic and vindicating in an entirely different way. It turns slash into intentional queerness. It takes a fetishisation of oppression vacillating between problematic and transformative, and finally stands up on the side of powerful, empowering transformation. It confronts the barriers that once rendered this desiring touch impossible, and breaks through them once and for all.

That's what taking away the glass means. That's what Good Omens did.

[rozaceous]

been mulling over this obsession ppl have (fanfic, traditional published works, comics, etc - basically any created-character world) with making characters beautiful, and especially singularly beautiful. part of this ofc is the conflation of beauty and goodness, which would then mean the most beautiful person is the most good also. or, in some cases, the most plot relevant lmao.

and if someone isn't beautiful, that's worth commenting on, too, bc that's a pointed choice, especially for a mousy heroine. (for whatever reason I'm thinking of Divergent, and how the ml responds to the mc saying she's not beautiful w "I like the way you look." idk why I'm remembering a mediocre book I read a decade ago, but there it is.) it really reminds me of how there is no unmarked woman.

except it's men, too! the male love interest is almost invariably singularly hot!

and it's the singularly that gets me, I think. even irl hot people I don't think of as 'the most beautiful xyz alive' so much as I just go, 'huh they're really hot.' (also, if you've ever been in an environment w lots of beautiful ppl as the norm - athletics, theater, etc - it really stops registering.)

most people just look... fine? and can go up or down the beauty/hotness scale acc to the amnt of effort they put in. personally, I find the obsession w beauty - which is also an obsession w desirability and thus w worth - exhausting. I'm exhausted.

but god, do we show ourselves in what we use as shorthand.

[evansbby]

What would Steve do if Omega went and got a job behind his back after she completed college? 😂 like Rosey is in school so she becomes the assistant of someone in her field especially if her boss was an alpha 😏 (imagine if her boss was Ari 😂😂)

I don’t think omega does anything without Steve’s permission 😭😭

But you’re inside my head bc ofc I’ve been thinking of scenarios like this!!! I can imagine them having a fight over it bc she really wants to get a job bc she feels restless at home now that Rosie has started preschool. Steve wants to have another baby and omega says she wants to try working first. Steve is super against this and doesn’t want her to work at all, especially now that he’s the senator and they’re in the public eye— he wants his wife to be a mother and housewife first and above all. So he puts his foot down.

Then omega goes behind his back and just starts applying for jobs for the heck of it… just to see if she’d be accepted. She applies for one job which she’s UNDER-qualified for and she gets it which makes her suspicious and she realises all these places only want to hire her bc of her last name (Rogers) and the fact that she’s the senator’s wife.

SO THEN she starts applying using her maiden name and she keeps getting rejections 🥲🥲 Turns out nobody wants to hire an omega in a job “more well suited for alphas.” This makes her really sad. THENNN I can imagine her getting finally accepted to a job at a female-run publishing house as a publishing assistant and she’s sooo happy! She tells Steve, and explains how she only has to go in two days a week and the rest is work from home.

Steve is… not thrilled. In fact, he gets angry bc how dare she apply with her maiden name bc that’s not her surname anymore. And how dare she go behind his back because she’s not allowed to do that. He asks her how she plans to do this job when she gets pregnant again because he DOES plan to get her pregnant again, like, as soon as possible.

Omega says she would like to wait another year before having another baby, so she can gain experience working. Steve is NOT having it (he’s in especially a bad mood bc of work stress and all that). So he just slams the door and leaves and sits and stews in his home office. Omega gets paranoid that he hates her and will leave her (although not that much, only a little bit bc she’s healing now) so she tells him she’s sorry and she won’t accept the job and she loves her family and loves him and if it makes him that upset, she’ll sacrifice the job to do what he says bc she knows that marriage means you have to sacrifice certain things.

But then STEVE (who has calmed down) feels bad bc he hates how sad she looks and he knows she’s been through so much and how could he really deny her from this happiness? There’s an internal war going on in his head because on one hand, he’s her alpha and his word is law and he shouldn’t be made to feel bad for putting his foot down. Tons of his friends and family keep their omegas under very tight control. He doesn’t want to be seen as lenient! But then he ultimately decides he doesn’t care, and that he wants her to be happy.

So he does a thorough background check on this publishing house, and is secretly pleased that the staff is all women (that’s a big deciding factor in letting her work there). And turns out, it helps him gain public favour too, bc Senator Steve Roger’s wife is not only the perfect submissive housewife and mother, but she is also a working woman! So Steve gets praised in the media for allowing her to work.

AJDJSKAK idk if this is canon bc although I like this, I also love the idea of omega being a traditional housewife and having baby after baby with Steve 🥹🥹 so let’s just call this a brainstorm idea draft whatever, but not officially canon! But not unofficial either! What do you guys think??

[horizon-verizon]

Thinking about how GRRM literally created Daemon to be Rhaenyra’s consort. For those who don’t know, originally GRRM couldn’t decide on who was the best option for Rhaenyra and that’s when he got the idea of Daemon. He literally created Daemon for Rhaenyra.

Rhaenyra was originally going to marry either a Lannister or Lyonel Strong (Daemon was not yet created or included in this draft) then GRRM thought up the character of Daemon and added him as Rhaenyra’s consort instead.

More male characters should be created SOLELY to love and support the female protagonist.

nobodysuspectsthebutterfly has a post showing GRRM originally had Rhaenyra marry Lyonel Strong (and how no matter what and by whatever husband, the greens were going to try to usurp her), evidenced by the RPG guide (2012) for ASoIaF.

F&B was published in 2015; The Rogue Prince was published along with other stories in an anthology in 2014; and PatQ was published back in 2013. I would say that he created Daemon for Rhaenyra to give Viserys more of a reason to want Rhaenyra as his heir, since Viserys, now that D exists, canonically also wished to make sure the realm would not go towards someone he didn't fully trust. Also it gives the story so much more breath when you have a character like Daemon. And, of course, Rhaenyra and Daemon are pretty compatible in terms of character and political necessities; they provide the other with what they need/want the most even as they aop were "rivals" for the throne even thought they also kinda weren't. This was always Rhaenyra's story, anyway, for all the other interesting characters that surround her and interacted, tried to remove or support her (Corlys, Rhaenys, Alicent, Aemond, etc.). Her childhood, rise, and fall impacted by the misogyny and what she did or tried to do to keep her kids alive AND vie for the throne she was given and had oaths of protection for.

"couldn't decide on who was best who was the best option for Rhaenyra" -- idk, perhaps it was more hi wanting to enrich the story and give more personality and "family" to this part of Targ history, as he has done more for Jaehaerys, Rhaena, Alysanne, Maegor-Aenys before them. This doesn't stop or negate how Daemon was likely made with Rhaenyra's support base in mind. It is compelling to hear of a man/partner do whatever he can for his lover/wife, whether or not he has a character the complexity or cooperativeness of a coconut or as complex as Daemon is bc you don't get that often in traditional fantasy, male centered fantasy. Or it's publicly reviled with a million excuses before whatever version and manifestation in a particular work is actually critiqued. Because sometimes, there is something to be said abt just fictional dudes who are just more trouble than they are worth being posed as a model man. The lines between such things can get crossed.

And it appears Harwin was also created for Rhaenyra since there is no mention of him before PatQ/2013. But he (Harwin) happens to have much less characterization & personality done for him AND Rhaenyra quite clearly wanted to live as freely with a partner as possible and that wasn't really going to happen with Harwin for as long as Laenor lived at least.

Even if she was angry at Daemon for a myriad of possible reasons for the 111-112 incidents and perhaps they finally got through a successful reconciliation through their shared love for Laena (even before her death), there's room for a lot of complex & layered feelings on Rhaenyra's part towards Daemon. And I mention all of this bc apparently, GRRM also toyed with the idea of exploring Rhaenyra and Harwin's relationship more, saying that:

There’s a whole story there. At least a novella, maybe a novel but we simply did not have the time to tell it [in the show]. And it did not fit the format of my history book. But it’s a story and I’d love to do that.

(he is saying that their relationship's arc alone could fill/become a novella and he thought about doing it) which does goes to show you that Harwin WAS very important in some way to Rhaenyra--guaranteed to be someone she felt and experienced was a positive one for a time in her life at the very least.

I don't really go for Harwin bc I don't know anything abt him apart from his position, family, and devotion to Rhaenyra...so he has very little appeal for me in terms of shipping. That, and again, Rhaenyra seems to be the type who wants the "best" sort of conditions to be herself and have relationships in the open. I explain/rant HERE.

Still I agree; more males made only for a woman, plz and thank you. It's what we deserve (if a man is there and/or the attraction is there).

[writingquestionsanswered]

I'm plotting my novel, and whilst I'm fleshing out the plot and characters, I realised I have no idea how long it's going to be. I think it has potential to be split into a series? But idk how many books it would be. Is there any sort of "test" for it? I wouldn't want to make the choice and end up forcing the story to fit. For example, I don't want to choose that' it's going to be trilogy when it really should be a duology. Or, I don't want to cram it all into a standalone when it should be 6.

Not Sure if Story Will Be a Series

This isn't something you need to decide before you've even plotted the first story. Whether you're plotting a stand alone story, the first book in a duology, or the first book in a series, the structure of the story will be the same. Story structure is story structure regardless of whether it's a stand alone or one book in a series. If you plan to seek traditional publishing, since traditional publishers rarely offer book deals for series (except to established authors), the first book will need to work as a stand alone while keeping things open for a next book.

So, plot out book one according to whatever story structure method you want to use, and you will know if there will be at least a second book. How you proceed beyond that is up to you. Some writers like to do a light outline of each subsequent book to get an idea of how many books will be in the series. Others leave it open-ended.

Happy writing!

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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[ofmermaidstories]

hello, please have this list of sunday evening thoughts & things & questions without any real answers:

1.

“Gaza is basically a man-made hell on earth”, by Jeremy Scahill. A interview with a Toronto surgeon, Yasser Khan, about his latest medical mission into Gaza, and the destruction facing the people and the health-infrastructure there.

I had one young man, about 25 years old, he lost one eye that I took out myself. He spent about five, six, or seven years, basically spent thousands and thousands of dollars in IVF treatment because he got married young and they wanted to have a child and they couldn’t have one. So he spent years on IVF treatment and finally had a baby that was 3 months old. And there was a missile attack by Israel at his home. He lost his entire family, including his baby and his wife and his parents and family. He’s by himself, single guy. I took his one eye out, and he has nobody in this world. He just kind of walks around the tent structures, just kind of walking around with no home and trying to sleep wherever he can.

i genuinely wonder at what a future with israel looks like. not just with the palestinians they’ve displaced, but like, with the rest of the world. israel will be dismantled, eventually, but until then how long is this misery going to be allowed to drag on? the US (and UK) are like—encouraging it. they want it, it’s always been in their joint interest that israel be established. idk. i have no doubt they’ll let that genocidal boot camp of a settlement run rampant like the brain-washed, blood-thirsty nazi wave they are, but all things give—this can’t carry on. the horror our varying governments force on us by watching it will have to boil over, eventually. the question is just—how, when. capitalism has done a bang-up job of separating us in the west from each other. you can’t take down your government if you don’t know your neighbour’s name. :/

2. these comments, on the youtube videos i’ve recently watched.

This first comment was a response to @/mynameismarines book review, ‘is to gaze upon wicked gods a colonizer romance?’. i find colonizer/colonized pairings to be intensely interesting, because they’re so often done so badly LMAO. i am not a person who believes there are topics/things you’re not allowed to write; everything is fair game. but the price of that is that you have to do it well, and by well i mean like—you have to ask yourself the question, “what does this mean for the people involved?” and you have to answer it. and you have to be prepared that at the end of the day the audience you invite might not agree with your answer!!! like, i think people in the romance/YA spheres think of colonizer/colonized as like, shorthand for a power-imbalance trope (which it does involve!) but it’s like, more than you know, some Billionaire/Secretary cliche. it’s literally the question of, ‘can you come to care about someone who is currently perpetuating the misery of your people?’ Like!!! that is a big question!!!!!!!!!! and you have to do the asking of it, the thesis of your book, justice. and that is a hard thing to do!!!!!! most of us tend to like… not like people who hurt the other people we love, LOL. so if you’re going to write that, you have to work overtime with it.

i’m sharing this comment here because it’s particularly addressing molly x. chang’s (the author of to gaze) knee-jerk reaction to (genuine, thoroughly detailed) negative reviews. which on one hand is understandable: molly was one of the targets in the goodreads sock-puppet review bombing, by one of her peers. but her reaction to these genuine reviews (brought to her attention by a third party!) has been an interesting case-study in like, why the lines between fanfic communities and traditional publishing blurring is a bad thing. because @/aclutteredlife is right, we have different rules here in our community that properly published books have, with their readers!!! i think it’s natural, for instance, for readers to be drawn to a proxy (Reader-chan for us) to be put in a position that generates a lot of angst (losing your family to a raid by a band of fantasy barbarians, for example), because that angst creates an opportunity for The Romance (the comfort, the understanding, the regret and then the assimilation into a new life with ur romance at the centre, cherished wife of the Hot Fantasy Barbarian Husband). in a fanfic, if you have issues with how it’s being presented, you might leave a dissatisfied comment—(“why is she forgetting that Hot Fantasy Barbarian Husband murdered her entire family???”)—but the general understanding is that it’s not for you, at that stage!!! like it’s probably some 14 year old kid that’s just recently discovered captivity tropes or something, like sure you can be annoyed or frustrated but if the writer doesn’t want to answer (or be asked!!!) those questions move on, you know? you didn’t spend money on this, you can hit the back button and find a different fic. complain about it to the group chat if you absolutely have to, LOL. but move on.

but when it’s a traditionally published book who’s author was supposedly given an advance for it the size of half a million dollars? half a million dollars that the publisher is going to try and make back by selling it to readers like you, who will part with your hard-earnt money for a copy? yeah. we’re not a community just trying to entertain each other and ourselves anymore, at that stage. you made a transaction. a transaction to then engage with this piece of art, and the transaction part of that exchange means you get to ask those hard, uncomfortable questions—especially if the art in question doesn’t.

this point kinda bleeds into the next one, tho, so i’ll let the screenshot speak for itself:

LOL. yeah….. yeah. yeah. 🥹

the third comment is from the same video as the second (booktok, brainrot, and why it’s okay to be a hater), but i thought the highlighted part was interesting because it like, kinda made me think of the way things work around here on tumblr, in our fanfic corners LOL. like… you know. how we might share little soundbites about ideas, or just a throw away couple of sentences about an AU or character. and we all do it, that’s the culture of our community, i just find it interesting—telling—that it’s such a… quick and almost guaranteed way of like, getting enmeshed into the community, getting followers, etc etc etc.

like i said, these are just some thoughts & things without any real answers to them. i am always happy to hear ur opinions too (unless they are wrong in which case i regret to inform u we will have to knife fight over it 😔😌🫱🏽🔪).

[balrogballs]

Have you been working all the time when writing? I was thinking a book advance is like a salary you get paid, but is it not really that much to make a living? Does it vary between genre or is it a standard price? Btw, your job sounds so awesome too

I'm apologizing again for all the questions, and love u for answering them all, I'm an aspiring novelist and nobody I know in real life knows I want to write for a living. I'm very grateful for your lists last week as well.

No problem, happy to help!

Keeping the answer under the cut though, since IDK if ppl who followed balrogballs for elrond reasons want to hear balrogballs go on about the publishing industry LMAO

Working/Writing:

I have indeed worked throughout my writing career, though for most of the first book writing time I was finishing my PhD. Most authors work on the side, unless you reach absolutely top level and can coast off royalties and speaker fees etc.

Eg. I was at an event where Rushdie gave the keynote, and overheard his rate for the evening was around 55K USD. The vast majority of writers will never pull those figures — the highest I've ever been paid to do a talk was £1.5k, and that was a one off and probably won't happen again.

Put it this way, I know a Booker winner and a Nobel winner personally, both wins in the last 5 years, and both worked part time as university professors till the win. Living off writing is very difficult in the traditional publishing sense unless you hit a certain level of success.

And thank you for your nice words about my job — I do enjoy it and it's very fulfilling, and means I have a ton of free time when I'm not posted overseas so I have ample time to write (and can fuck about on here lol).

Advance

Take anything I say here with a pinch of salt, as this varies tremendously due to a ton of different factors including genre, publisher, location, market etc.

The advance isn't paid like a salary, it's paid in chunks. For me, I had it in 4 lots across around 2 years. So that method of payment means it's not feasible to use as salary.

Keep in mind, you're not paid while you write your second book — only once it sells will you get the second advance, so again, the 'gaps' need to be covered. I took around a year to write the second one and sent the draft manuscript in June to my agent for edits, and it'll only go to the publishers early next year. So thats a lot of time w/o steady income.

How much it is can vary immensely — mine was around double my general salary. I got very lucky in that the book went to auction and my agent is an outstanding negotiator, so the bidding contributed to the final sum. But yes, it varies based on a ton of different factors.

You don't get the full amount btw, it's taxable income + the agency will take a cut. High advances are also a double edged sword, however - you need to "earn them out" before you get any royalties. For instance, I had a great signing advance, but this means there's no chance I ever see any royalties.

So again, that means no income at all when writing the second thing.

It's not an issue in litfic since literally nobody earns out unless you get one of the biggest prizes, though am not sure about other genres. But yes, big advance = much longer wait for royalties, and royalties themselves aren't normally very much either, so keep that in mind when thinking of salaries etc.

Social Profile

I'll answer your other question re: whether social media and public profile is beneficial for a writer here just to not clog ppls feeds. Prior to querying, only if you're writing a non fiction book will your social following actually matter, as you are very much part of the "package deal".

In fiction, it matters much less. Cassandra Claire trajectories are very rare, and whilst Booktoker book deals have happened, again they have VERY large followings to the point that they are part of the product itself.

Whether it's important after publishing, I'm not sure. My agent says no, but equally, others say yes.

Some authors are very active on SM, but equally many others I know are like me in that they have an anon profile somewhere but nothing identifiable. Eg. w. me, I don't have any socials other than this and won't be getting any — a publicist handles the official accounts so I can be unhinged here in peace and not worry about accidentally tweeting about balrog testicle LMAOOO 🙏

Hope this has helped ✨

[olderthannetfic]

The previous convos about sensitivity readers and purity culture in booktwit types definitely feels familiar. I'll never forget when I was querying agents a few years ago with a novel I wrote, and I was told my writing "caused discomfort," was "problematic" and could be seen as racist/anti-black and having a lot of instances of queerphobia and misogynoir. The novel was a horror-fantasy story that actually was based on the transatlantic slave trade but on a different planet (So, yes, I would hope that this kind of story would be disturbing and cause discomfort in the reader. Mission accomplished). The plot covered several generations of the captured aliens who were enslaved (a la A Hundred Years of Solitude), the fallout of their enslavement, and the mistreatment of the enslaved people as a result. Most of the agents who requested the full manuscript said they liked the story, but I was met with many intrusive questions about my identity, race, gender, and sexuality and urges to work with a sensitivity reader should we progress forward as agent and writer. I am a Black, femme nonbinary, bisexual person. This was all fine and dandy with them, so they wanted to make this information about my identity public for consumers to appease the Twitter crowd and dissuade callout posts from the functionally illiterate. I wanted to maintain my dignity and not disclose any personal information. (They assumed it was because I was in the closet or something. I was not then and am not now. My identity just isn't anyone's business if they want to read a book, simple as that. This was also especially because there are mentions of sexual assault of some characters, and that kind of information definitely isn't anyone's business to know about an author. Period.) I also didn't want to hire a sensitivity reader because they were advertised to me as someone who performed outrage at works for a living (It also didn't help that I was linked to a few sensitivity readers who were very vocal on YA book Twitter and SFF Twitter. No thank you.). This was, apparently, a problem. That was when I decided publishing may not be for me, at least traditional publishing.

--

Yeah, sadly, I feel there is an audience for that book, but you're going to have to find it yourself. Anything YA adjacent is too outrage-driven without the necessary nuance, but a lot of more oldschool SFF circles are too full of the kind of sensitive, delicate white guys who wouldn't get this book either. Maybe an indie black press? Somewhere with a more literary bent that thrives on controversial books? Depending on how horror-y it is, maybe there's an avenue to pursue there. Horror fans do include a lot of manbabies too, but those circles can be more open to actually dark stuff.

At least self publishing is easy now, but self publishing and then getting a significant number of people to buy and read the book is hard.

I promise that decent sensitivity readers exist, but the ones that crowd is going to send you to are... not equipped to deal with dark horror fantasy, in my opinion.

And as a writer, I wouldn't work with anyone I didn't know pretty well anyway. How are you supposed to evaluate the feedback of a rando? What if they fundamentally don't get your genre?

If you do decide to press on, I think I'd look for like-minded fellow writers to begin with. Start a club. Serialize your stuff in the same place. IDK. There are plenty of grown-ass adults who buy books and who like nuance. There's got to be some way to find your audience.

It would be a pity to give up just because publishing is full of cowards.

[canmom]

yarr harr, fiddle de dee [more on piracy networks]

being a pirate is all right to be...

I didn't really intend this post as an overview of all the major methods of piracy. But... since a couple of alternatives have been mentioned in the comments... let me infodump talk a little about 1. Usenet and 2. direct peer-to-peer systems like Gnutella and Soulseek. How they work, what their advantages are on a system level, how convenient they are for the user, that kind of thing.

(Also a bit at the end about decentralised hash table driven networks like IPFS and Freenet, and the torrent indexer BTDigg).

Usenet

First Usenet! Usenet actually predates the web, it's one of the oldest ways people communicated on the internet. Essentially it's somewhere between a mailing list and a forum (more accurately, a BBS - BBSes were like forums you had to phone, to put it very crudely, and predate the internet as such).

On Usenet, it worked like this. You would subscribe to a newsgroup, which would have a hierarchical name like rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated (for talking about your favourite TV show, Babylon 5) or alt.transgendered (for talking about trans shit circa 1992). You could send messages to the newsgroup, which would then be copied between the various Usenet servers, where other people could download them using a 'news reader' program. If one of the Usenet servers went down, the others acted as a backup. Usenet was a set of protocols rather than a service as such; it was up to the server owners which other servers they would sync with.

Usenet is only designed to send text information. In theory. Back in the day, when the internet was slow, this was generally exactly what people sent. Which didn't stop people posting, say, porn... in ASCII form. (for the sake of rigour, that textfile's probably from some random BBS, idk if that one ever got posted to Usenet). The maximum size of a Usenet post ('article', in traditional language) depends on the server, but it's usually less than a megabyte, which does not allow for much.

As the internet took off, use of Usenet in the traditional way declined. Usenet got flooded with new users (an event named 'Eternal September'; September was traditionally when a cohort of students would start at university and thus gain access to Usenet, causing an influx of new users who didn't know the norms) and superseded by the web. But it didn't get shut down or anything - how could it? It's a protocol; as long as at least one person is running a Usenet server, Usenet exists.

But while Usenet may be nigh-unusable as a discussion forum now thanks to the overwhelming amount of spam, people found another use for the infrastructure. Suppose you have a binary file - an encoded movie, for example. You can encode that into ASCII strings using Base64 or similar methods, split it up into small chunks, and post the whole lot onto Usenet, where it will get synchronised across the network. Then, somewhere on the web, you publish a list of all the Usenet posts and their position in the file. This generally uses the NZB format. A suitable newsreader can then take that NZB file and request all the relevant pieces from a Usenet server and assemble them into a file.

NZB sites are similar to torrent trackers in that they don't directly host pirated content, but tell you where to get it. Similar to torrent trackers, some are closed and some are open. However, rather than downloading the file piecemeal from whoever has a copy as in a torrent, you are downloading it piecemeal from a big central server farm. Since these servers are expensive to run, access to Usenet is usually a paid service.

For this to work you need the Usenet servers to hold onto the data for long enough to people to get it. Generally speaking the way it works is that the server has a certain storage buffer; when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting old files. So there's an average length of time until the old file gets deleted, known as the 'retention time'. For archival purposes, that's how long you got; if you want to keep something on Usenet after that, upload it again.

As a system for file distribution... well, it's flawed, because it was never really designed as a file sharing system, but somehow it works. The operator of a Usenet server has to keep tens of petabytes of storage, to hold onto all the data on the Usenet network for a retention period of years, including the hundreds of terabytes uploaded daily, much of which is spam; it also needs to fetch it reliably and quickly for users, when the files are spread across the stream of data in random places. That's quite a system engineering challenge! Not surprisingly, data sometimes ends up corrupted. There is also a certain amount of overhead associated with encoding to ASCII and including parity checks to avoid corruption, but it's not terribly severe. In practice... if you have access to Usenet and know your way to a decent NZB site, I remember it generally working pretty well. Sometimes there's stuff on Usenet that's hard to find on other sources.

Like torrents, Usenet offers a degree of redundancy. Suppose there's a copyrighted file on Usenet server A, and it gets a DMCA notice and complies. But it's still on Usenet servers B, C and D, and so the (ostensible) copyright holder has to go and DMCA them as well. However, it's less redundant, since there are fewer Usenet servers, and operating one is so much more involved. I think if the authorities really wanted to crush Usenet as a functional file distribution system, they'd have an easier time of it than destroying torrents. Probably the major reason they don't is that Usenet is now a fairly niche system, so the cost/benefit ratio would be limited.

In terms of security for users, compared to direct peer to peer services, downloading from Usenet has the advantage of not broadcasting your IP on the network. Assuming the server implements TLS (any modern service should), if you don't use a VPN, your ISP will be able to see that you connected to a Usenet server, but not what you downloaded.

In practice?

for torrenting, if you use public trackers you definitely 100% want a VPN. Media companies operate sniffers which will connect to the torrent swarm and keep track of what IP addresses connect. Then, they will tell your ISP 'hey, someone is seeding our copyrighted movie on xyz IP, tell them to stop'. At this point, your ISP will usually send you a threatening email on a first offence and maybe cutoff your internet on a second. Usually this is a slap on the wrist sort of punishment, ISPs really don't care that much, and they will reconnect you if you say sorry... but you can sidestep that completely with a VPN. at that point the sniffer can only see the VPN's IP address, which is useless to them.

for Usenet, the threat model is more niche. There's no law against connecting to Usenet, and to my knowledge, Usenet servers don't really pay attention to anyone downloading copyrighted material from their servers (after all, there's no way they don't know the main reason people are uploading terabytes of binary data every day lmao). But if you want to be sure the Usenet server doesn't ever see your IP address, and your ISP doesn't know you connected to Usenet, you can use a VPN.

(In general I would recommend a VPN any time you're pirating or doing anything you don't want your IP to be associated with. Better safe than sorry.)

What about speed? This rather depends on your choice of Usenet provider, how close it is to you, and what rate limits they impose, but in practice it's really good since it's built on incredibly robust, pre-web infrastructure; this is one of the biggest advantages of Usenet. For torrents, by contrast... it really depends on the swarm. A well seeded torrent can let you use your whole bandwidth, but sometimes you get unlucky and the only seed is on the other side of the planet and you can only get about 10kB/s off them.

So, in short, what's better, Usenet or BitTorrent? The answer is really It Depends, but there's no reason not to use both, because some stuff is easier to find on torrents (most anime fansub groups tend to go for torrent releases) and some stuff is easier to find on Usenet (e.g. if it's so old that the torrents are all dead). In the great hierarchy of piracy exclusivity, Usenet sits somewhere between private and public torrent trackers.

For Usenet, you will need to figure out where to find those NZBs. Many NZB sites require registration/payment to access the NZB listing, and some require you to be invited. However, it's easier to get into an NZB site than getting on a private torrent tracker, and requires less work once you're in to stay in.

Honestly? It surprises me that Usenet hasn't been subject to heavier suppression, since it's relatively centralised. It's got some measure of resilience, since Usenet servers are distributed around the world, and if they started ordering ISPs to block noncomplying Usenet servers, people would start using VPNs, proxies would spring up; it would go back to the familiar whack-a-mole game.

I speculate the only reason it's not more popular is the barrier to entry is just very slightly higher than torrents. Like, free always beats paid, even though in practice torrents cost the price of a VPN sub. Idk.

(You might say it requires technical know-how... but is 'go on the NZB indexer to download an NZB and then download a file from Usenet' really so much more abstruse than 'go on the tracker to download a torrent and then download a file from the swarm'?)

direct peer to peer (gnutella, soulseek, xdcc, etc.)

In a torrent, the file is split into small chunks, and you download pieces of your file from everyone who has a copy. This is fantastic for propagation of the file across a network because as soon as you have just one piece, you can start passing it on to other users. And it's great for downloading, since you can connect to lots of different seeds at once.

However, there is another form of peer to peer which is a lot simpler. You provide some means to find another person who has your file, and they send you the file directly.

This is the basis that LimeWire worked on. LimeWire used two protocols under the hood, one of them BitTorrent, the other a protocol called Gnutella. When the US government ordered LimeWire shut down, the company sent out a patch to LimeWire users that made the program delete itself. But both these protocols are still functioning. (In fact there's even an 'unofficial' fork of the LimeWire code that you can use.)

After LimeWire was shut down, Gnutella declined, but it didn't disappear by any means. The network is designed to be searchable, so you can send out a query like 'does anyone have a file whose name contains the string "Akira"' and this will spread out across the network, and you will get a list of people with copies of Akira, or the Akira soundtrack, and so on. So there's no need for indexers or trackers, the whole system is distributed. That said, you are relying on the user to tell the truth about the contents of the file. Gnutella has some algorithmic tricks to make scanning the network more efficient, though not to the same degree as DHTs in torrents. (DHTs can be fast because they are looking for one computer, the appointed tracker, based on a hash of the file contents. Tell me if you wanna know about DHTs, they're a fascinating subject lol).

Gnutella is not the only direct file sharing protocol. Another way you can introduce 'person who wants a file' and 'person who has a file' is to have a central server which everyone connects to, often providing a chatroom function along with coordinating connections.

This can be as simple as an IRC server. Certain IRC clients (by no means all) support a protocol called XDCC, which let you send files to another user. This has been used by, for example, anime fansub groups - it's not really true anymore, but there was a time where the major anime fansub groups operated XDCC bots and if you wanted their subs, you had to go on their IRC and write a command to the bot to send it to you.

XDCC honestly sucked though. It was slow if you didn't live near the XDCC bot, and often the connection would often crap out mid download and you'd have to manually resume (thankfully it was smart enough not to have to start over from the beginning), and of course, it is fiddly to go on a server and type a bunch of IRC commands. It also put the onus of maintaining distribution entirely on the fansub group - your group ran out of money or went defunct and shut down its xdcc bot? Tough luck. That said, it was good for getting old stuff that didn't have a torrent available.

Then there's Soulseek! Soulseek is a network that can be accessed using a handful of clients. It is relatively centralised - there are two major soulseek servers - and they operate a variety of chat rooms, primarily for discussing music.

To get on Soulseek you simply register a username, and you mark at least one folder for sharing. There doesn't have to be anything in it, but a lot of users have it set so that they won't share anything unless you're sharing a certain amount of data yourself.

You can search the network and get a list of users who have matching files, or browse through a specific user's folder. Each user can set up their own policy about upload speed caps and so on. If you find something you want to download, you can queue it up. The files will be downloaded in order.

One interesting quirk of Soulseek is that the uploader will be notified (not like a push notification, but you see a list of who's downloading/downloaded your files). So occasionally someone will notice you downloading and send you a friendly message.

Soulseek is very oriented towards music. Officially, its purpose is to help promote unsigned artists, not to infringe copyright; in practice it's primarily a place for music nerds to hang out and share their collections. And although it's faced a bit of legal heat, it seems to be getting by just fine.

However, there's no rule that you can only share music. A lot of people share films etc. There's really no telling what will be on Soulseek.

Since Soulseek is 1-to-1 connections only, it's often pretty slow, but it's often a good bet if you can't find something anywhere else, especially if that something is music. In terms of resilience, the reliance on a single central server to connect people to peers is a huge problem - that's what killed Napster back in the day, if the Soulseek server was shut down that would be game over... unless someone else set up a replacement and told all the clients where to connect. And yet, somehow it's gotten away with it so far!

In terms of accessibility, it's very easy: just download a client, pick a name and password, and share a few gigs (for example: some movies you torrented) and you're good.

In terms of safety, your IP is not directly visible in the client, but any user who connects directly to you would be able to find it out with a small amount of effort. I'm not aware of any cases of IP sniffers being used on Soulseek, but I would recommend a VPN all the same to cover your bases - better safe than sorry.

Besides the public networks like Soulseek and Gnutella, there are smaller-scale, secret networks that also work on direct connection basis, e.g. on university LANs, using software such as DC++. I cannot give you any advice on getting access to these, you just have to know the right person.

Is that all the ways you can possibly pirate? Nah, but I think that's the main ones.

Now for some more niche shit that's more about the kind of 'future of piracy' type questions in the OP, like, can the points of failure be removed..?

IPFS

Since I talked a little above about DHTs for torrents, I should maybe spare a few words about this thing. Currently on the internet you specify the address of a certain computer connected to the network using an IP address. (Well, typically the first step is to use the DNS to get an IP address.) IPFS is based on the idea of 'content-based addressing' instead; like torrents, it specifies a file using a hash of the content.

This leads to a 'distributed file system'; the ins and outs are fairly complicated but it has several layers of querying. You can broadcast that you want a particular chunk of data to "nearby" nodes; if that fails to get a hit, you can query a DHT which directs you to someone who has a list of sources.

In part, the idea is to create a censorship-resistant network: if a node is removed, the data may still be available on other nodes. However, it makes no claim to outright permanence, and data that is not requested is gradually flushed from nodes by garbage collection. If you host a node, you can 'pin' data so it won't be deleted, or you can pay someone else to do that on their node. (There's also some cryptocurrency blockchain rubbish that is supposed to offer more genuine permanence.)

IPFS is supposed to act as a replacement for the web, according to its designers. This is questionable. Most of what we do on the web right now is impossible on IPFS. However, I happen to like static sites, and it's semi-good at that. It is, sympathetically, very immature; I remember reading one very frustrated author writing about how hard it was to deploy a site to IPFS, although that was some years ago and matters seem to have improved a bit since then.

I said 'semi-good'. Since the address of your site changes every time you update it, you will end up putting multiple redundant copies of your site onto the network at different hashes (though the old hashes will gradually disappear). You can set a DNS entry that points to the most recent IPFS address of your site, and rely on that propagating across the DNS servers. Or, there's a special mutable distributed name service on the IPFS network based around public/private key crypto; basically you use a hash of your public key as the address and that returns a link to the latest version of your site signed with your private key.

Goddamn that's a lot to try to summarise.

Does it really resist censorship? Sorta. If a file is popular enough to propagate enough the network, it's hard to censor it. If there's only one node with it, it's no stronger than any other website. If you wanted to use it as a long term distributed archive, it's arguably worse than torrents, because data that's not pinned is automatically flushed out of the network.

It's growing, if fairly slowly. You can announce and share stuff on it. It has been used to bypass various kinds of web censorship now and then. Cloudflare set a bunch of IPFS nodes on their network last year. But honestly? Right now it's one of those projects that is mostly used by tech nerds to talk to other tech nerds. And unfortunately, it seems to have caught a mild infection of cryptocurrency bullshit as well. Thankfully none of that is necessary.

What about piracy? Is this useful for our nefarious purposes? Well, sort of. Libgen has released all its books on IPFS; there is apparently an effort to upload the content of ZLib to IPFS as well, under the umbrella of 'Anna's Archive' which is a meta-search engine for LibGen, SciHub and a backup of ZLib. By nature of IPFS, you can't put the actual libgen index site on it (since it constantly changes as new books are uploaded, and dynamic serverside features like search are impossible on IPFS). But books are an ideal fit for IPFS since they're usually pretty small.

For larger files, they are apparently split into 256kiB chunks and hashed individually. The IPFS address links to a file containing a list of chunk hashes, or potentially a list of lists of chunk hashes in a tree structure. (Similar to using a magnet link to acquire a torrent file; the short hash finds you a longer list of hashes. Technically, it's all done with Merkle trees, the same data structure used in torrents).

One interesting consequence of this design is that the chunks don't necessarily 'belong' to a particular file. If you're very lucky, some of your chunks will already be established on the network. This also further muddies the waters of whether a particular user is holding onto copyrighted data or not, since a particular hash/block might belong to both the tree of some copyrighted file and the tree of some non-copyrighted file. Isn't that fun?

The other question I had was about hash collisions. Allegedly, these are almost impossible with the SHA-256 hash used by default on IPFS, which produces a 256-bit address. This is tantamount to saying that of all the possible 256KiB strings of data, only at most about 1 in 8000 will actually ever be distributed with the IPFS. Given the amount of 256-kibibyte strings is around 4.5 * 10^631305, this actually seems like a fairly reasonable assumption. Though, given that number, it seems a bit unlikely that two files will ever actually have shared chunks. But who knows, files aren't just random data so maybe now and then, there will be the same quarter-megabyte in two different places.

That said, for sharing large files, IPFS doesn't fundamentally offer a huge advantage over BitTorrent with DHT. If a lot of people are trying to download a file over IPFS, you will potentially see similar dynamics to a torrent swarm, where chunks spread out across the network. Instead of 'seeding' you have 'pinning'.

It's an interesting technology though, I'll be curious to see where it goes. And I strongly hope 'where it goes' is not 'increasingly taken over by cryptocurrency bullshit'.

In terms of security, an IPFS node is not anonymous. It's about as secure as torrents. Just like torrents, the DFT keeps a list of all the nodes that have a file. So if you run an IPFS node, it would be easy to sniff out if you are hosting a copyrighted file on IPFS. That said, you can relatively safely download from IPFS without running a node or sharing anything, since the IPFS.tech site can fetch data for you. Although - if you fetch a site via the IPFS.tech site (or any other site that provides IPFS access over http), IPFS.tech will gain a copy of the file and temporarily provide it. So it's not entirely tantamount to leeching - although given the level of traffic on IPFS.tech I can't imagine stuff lasts very long on there.

Freenet Hyphanet

Freenet (officially renamed to Hyphanet last month, but most widely known as Freenet) is another, somewhat older, content-based addressing distributed file store built around a DHT. The difference between IPFS and Freenet is that Freenet prioritises anonymity over speed. Like in IPFS, the data is split into chunks - but on Freenet, the file is spread out redundantly across multiple different nodes immediately, not when they download it, and is duplicated further whenever it's downloaded.

Unlike torrents and IPFS, looking up a file causes it to spread out across the network, instead of referring you to an IP address. Your request is routed around the network using hashes in the usual DHT way. If it runs into the file, it comes back, writing copies at each step along the way. If a node runs out of space it overwrites the chunks that haven't been touched in a while. So if you get a file back, you don't know where it came from. The only IP addresses you know are your neighbours in the network.

There's a lot of complicated and clever stuff about how the nodes swap roles and identities in the network to gradually converge towards an efficient structure while maintaining that degree of anonymity.

Much like IPFS, data on Freenet is not guaranteed to last forever. If there's a lot of demand, it will stick around - but if no nodes request the file for a while, it will gradually get flushed out.

As well as content-based hashing, the same algorithm can be used for routing to a cryptographic signature, which lets you define a semi-mutable 'subspace' (you can add new files later which will show up when the key is queried). In fact a whole lot of stuff seems to be built on this, including chat services and even a Usenet-like forum with a somewhat complex 'web of trust' anti-spam system.

If you use your computer as a Freenet node, you will necessarily be hosting whatever happens to route through it. Freenet is used for much shadier shit than piracy. As far as safety, the cops are trying to crack it, though probably copyrighted stuff is lower on their priority list than e.g. CSAM.

Is Freenet used for piracy? If it is, I can't find much about it on a cursory search. The major problem it has is latency. It's slow to look stuff up, and slow to download it since it has to be copied to every node between you and the source. The level of privacy it provides is just not necessary for everyday torrenting, where a VPN suffices.

BTDigg

Up above I lamented the lack of discoverability on BitTorrent. There is no way to really search the BitTorrent network if you don't know exactly the file you want. This comes with advantages (it's really fast; DHT queries can be directed to exactly the right node rather than spreading across the network as in Gnutella) but it means BitTorrent is dependent on external indices to know what's available on the network and where to look for it.

While I was checking I had everything right about IPFS, I learned there is a site called BTDigg (wikipedia) which maintains a database of torrents known from the Mainline DHT (the primary DHT used by BitTorrent). Essentially, when you use a magnet link to download a torrent file, you query the DHT to find a node that has the full .torrent file, which tells you what you need to download to get the actual content of the torrent. BTDigg has been running a scraper which notes magnet links coming through its part of the DHT and collects the corresponding .torrent files; it stores metadata and magnet links in a database that is text-searchable.

This database isn't hosted on the BitTorrent network, so it's as vulnerable to takedown as any other tracker, but it does function as a kind of backup record of what torrents exist if the original tracker has gone. So give that a try if the other sites fail.

Say something about TOR?

I've mentioned VPNs a bunch, but what about TOR? tl;dr: don't use TOR for most forms of piracy.

I'm not gonna talk about TOR in detail beyond to say I wouldn't recommend using TOR for piracy for a few reasons:

TOR doesn't protect you if you're using torrents. Due to the way the BitTorrent protocol works, your IP will leak to the tracker/DHT. So there's literally no point to using TOR.

If that's not enough to deter you, TOR is slow. It's not designed for massive file transfers and it's already under heavy use. Torrents would strain it much further.

If you want an anonymisation network designed with torrents in mind, instead consider I2P. Using a supported torrent client (right now p much just Vuze and its fork BiglyBT - I would recommend the latter), you can connect to a torrent swarm that exists purely inside the I2P network. That will protect you from IP sniffers, at the cost of reducing the pool of seeds you can reach. (It also might be slower in general thanks to the onion routing, not sure.)

What's the future of piracy?

So far the history of piracy has been defined by churn. Services and networks grow popular, then get shut down. But the demand continues to exist and sooner or later, they are replaced. Techniques are refined.

It would be nice to imagine that somewhere up here comes the final, unbeatable piracy technology. It should be... fast, accessible, easy to navigate, reliably anonymous, persistent, and too widespread and ~rhizomatic~ to effectively stamp out. At that point, when 'copies of art' can no longer function as a scarce commodity, what happens? Can it finally be decoupled from the ghoulish hand of capital? Well, if we ever find out, it will be in a very different world to this one.

Right now, BitTorrent seems the closest candidate. The persistent weaknesses: the need for indexers and trackers, the lack of IP anonymity, and the potential for torrents to die out. Also a lot of people see it as intimidating - there's a bunch of jargon (seeds, swarms, magnet links, trackers, peers, leeches, DHT) which is pretty simple in practice (click link, get thing) but presents a barrier to entry compared to googling 'watch x online free'.

Anyway, really the thing to do is, continue to pirate by any and all means available. Don't put it all in one basket, you know? Fortunately, humanity is waaaay ahead of me on that one.

do what you want 'cos a pirate is free you are a pirate

[safely-in-vhagars-belly]

Aegonxocreader

Dark stuff

Warnings: dark non con slavery kidnapping arranged marriages and animal abuse sort of.

Word count: mine says about 4251♡

Chapters published:2

Title: the first night.

Concept: You got married without permission from the royals and they don't like that so they decide to bring back a horrible old tradition from the grave where it shouldve stayed.

Not my gif. Idk how to make any gifs. Credits to who owns it.

The dress you wear is a simple white gown. It was made by your friend. She had to work every day in the tavern to earn enough coin to buy the silk from the tailor.

You slowly walk down the aisle to your future and to your soon to be husband. The cheap tavern you both rented for the festivities is filled with his friends and some of yours. Your family couldn't attend.

You didn't even tell them you are getting married. They don't know you are, in fact, alive.

He smiles and takes his hands into your own. You feel his heartbeat through his hands, and you feel your soul slowly connect and intertwine with his as the septon speaks the words you dreamt of hearing ever since you were little.

'We stand here in the sight of gods and men to witness the union of man and wife: one flesh, one heart, one soul, now and forever.' You happily kiss your husband on his cheeks. Faybaen kisses you gently on your lips, and you feel him cloak you. The septon spreads his arms to address the crowd.

'Let it be known that Bessie Stone and Faybaen Stone are one heart, one flesh, one soul. Cursed be they who would seak to tear-'

The door of the tavern is pushed upon, and unexpected guests enter. You back away slowly, assuming your family finally found you. You take Faybaens hand into your own and whisper something in his ear. 'In case it is my father, stab me before he can drag me back. I rather die here with you than live with my awful family.' You whisper in your husband ear. He nods and prepares a small dagger ready to end your life.

Faybaen shakes his head and puts it away moments later. You feel uneasy. Gold cloaks. Only one kind of person has that. The king. 'It is not your family. I know those kinds of cloaks from the capital. This is the Kingsguard.' The cloaks are indeed unmistakably gold with white. You don't understand what they are doing here. This is an illegal wedding, perhaps, but surely they have bigger fishes to fry with the queen in open rebellion and the usurper on the throne? With the former Kings funeral and the wars?

A man comes to you.

He has silver short hairs and wears impressive armour. You know him as Aegon of house Targaryen. You suppose it's King Aegon now.

Next to you, Faybaen already curses before getting to his knees, kneeling for the king of the seven kingdoms. He hates kneeling for other men. You fake a smile and curtsy, like you did so many times. Most of your friends here are supporters of Rhaenyra. Most of them kneel for now and await their turn.

Another taller figure follows the king; He has also silver hair, but it's much longer, and he wears a very unstylish eyepatch. Faybaen gulps. 'Oh no.' He stutters softly before getting up and walking to the two brothers.

You lift your skirts before rushing and quickly follow him with your fake smile still on your lips like its armour. 'M'lords, Welcome to eh ...The tavern of my uncle, Gibsen.' Faybaen points to his uncle, who has already fled and is no longer where Faybaen points to.

Faybaen lowers his arms and nods half before eying the royals.

'Thank you, Mr-' the prince speaks before the king, and that does surprise you.

You walk to your husband and join him. 'Oh, I'm just Faybaen Stone, m'lord.' He says with a nervous little laugh. You know he is terrified. You subtly show your support by taking his hands into your own. Faybaen is a wanted criminal, after all.

The king looks around the ceremony hall that is decorated with small and cheap decorations to make it feel festive like paper doves and white simple flowers. 'Is this supposed to be a wedding?' He asks, clearly not fond of the decorations and the location.

Faybaen laughs forced and nods. The prince's eye falls on you, and he narrows it. For a moment, you see him think like he knows who you are. You smile back calmly and pretend to be just fine when inside you are nearly breaking under the pressure. This is just a test. You tell yourself.

'You must be the bride.' The king says, taking in your simple white wedding gown. He eyes you as Faybaen does. Full of desire.

You nod and make a curtsy. You still haven't forgotten how to do that. You do it too well, and Aemonds brows raise in suspicion.

'Indeed, your grace. Welcome to our humble little town. What brings you here, if you don't mind me asking so?' You can't imagine anyone stopping here anyway without good reason. Perhaps they heard rumours about the treason plot, or they are looking for Faybaen.

Come to think of it: They are not here for Faybaen. He is wanted for murders. They wouldn't send the King and the future king regent to him.

The king shrugs a bit before taking a glass of wine that is handed to him by Faybaen.

'We were passing by and needed to rest somewhere.' That could be true. And it could also be a lie.

You clap your hands, pretending to be delighted and calm. You force a smile at both of them, masking your fears very well.

'I won't keep you long, then. Please, enjoy yourselves.' You gesture to the cake displayed and the buffet of simple delicious baked goods.

Aemond steps closer to you before taking in your face very carefully. You stare back, still smiling.

'You look familair. Have we met?' He asks. You did not meet him. You do know who he is, and he might know who you are as well.

You laugh gently, a bit nervous, perhaps. 'No, I have been told I have a very common face. Perhaps that is it.' You say like that should the end of it. Aemond nods like he accepts that must be it and walks off to enjoy wine and some delicious cake.

Faybaen, meanwhile, talks to Aegon. 'My uncle wants to give you both free stay, free of charge. We planned to take the bridal suite but ...well, it is the only decent room here. You should take it, my king.' He says like he is a noble servant.

Aegon wants to already walk away, but Aemond quickly turns to Faybaen. 'Thank you, that is very generous. Are you sure your uncle is fine with us staying here? We can pay. We have no shortage of gold.' He already searches for what you assume is his wallet.

You know Faybaen a while now and now when he is spinning a story or a lie. 'Honestly, my Prince, think of all the good customers this will attract. That you both spend the night here will do wonders for our little town. It is our treat, really. Of course, your guards are welcome here as well. Food and beverages are on us.'

That makes Aemond very suspicious. 'What do you get out of this, besides publication and attention? It can't be profitable for you to give 30 men free food and housing.' He argues.

His brother sighs like a whiny little brat. 'Listen, Aemond. They want to feed us. What did they tell you about looking a horse in its mouth? If they try to kill us, we'll kill them first. It is that easy.'

Faybaen has that scoffing little glimmer in his eyes but keeps his voice neutral and grounded when turning his back to both of them and escorting them and the guards upstairs to the rooms.

You take a drink nervously. You hope you fooled them enough. Tomorrow, they'll be both gone.

Faybaen comes back to you and takes you with him to the stables. You know of the secret hidden room and enter it, and he follows. Inside, he lights a candle and sits down in one of the chairs. You join him and sigh.

He rubs his face with a towel before sighing deeply. When he speaks, you hear not the common tongue but the hoarse and throaty language of his family. The Dothraki. You have not heard the words in so long, but you still understand it just as clear when you were a little girl. 'They are onto us.'

You sigh and master to speak back in his tongue. 'Onto you, or me?' You ask, uneasy with both options.

Your uncle in law enters. Faybaen gets up and rushes over to him. Gibsen warns him with a single glance. 'Both of you should leave. This town is not safe. The pirate is asking about you.' His gaze falls upon you.

Pirate? He must mean Aemond.

You nod and gulp. 'Aemond did say he thought he recognised me. Which should be not possible. I never met him.' You were shipped to Essos when you were three. Before that, you never met any Targaryens.

'One of the guards has requested that you go to the royals. Now.' Uncle Gibsen says before helping you both out of the secret room again. 'You'll just be a good wife and keep your background as vague as possible. I don't know how long I can protect you, but by tomorrow we'll need to find a new house for you both.' He says.

He looks at Faybaen. 'You two should be outside tonight. You know it is what the great Stallion would want, Draezho. A Khal must ride his Khaleesie under the stars.' You heard that title before when you were a prisoner, but you never realised that your marriage to Faybaen would make you a Khaleesi. You feel pride and smile at Faybaen because of the exciting suggestion of him taking you under the stars far away from anyone to hear you both.

Like always, when his home is mentioned, Faybaen gets defensive. 'I am no Khal. Vazzo made sure of that when he slayed my entire Khalasar.' You accept that Faybaen has let his past be. But his friend does not. He finds the Dothraki exciting and thinks that Faybaen or Draezho should return to Essos and murder Vazzo.

You leave the stables.

You walk to the rooms of the royals and knock on the door. 'In,' you hear Aegons voice. You brace yourself and enter. Faybaen growls and follows.

Faybaen is very charming. It is one of the reasons why you fell for him. 'My king. How is the room?' He asks after he has been told to get up.

Aegon groans. 'It's the worst bed I ever laid on.' He says, and you don't doubt him for a moment. He is spoiled.

'What is your name, darling?' Aemond asks you suddenly. Faybaen raises a brow in offence by that little nickname, but you know he knows better than to hook Aemond on his nose for calling you darling.

You curtsy before introducing yourself. 'Bessie Stone.' You say softly. 'Why, my Prince? Do you think you saw me milk a goat somewhere before?' You joke.

Aemond shakes his head with a chuckle. 'I heard rumours once. About a beautiful rich house richer than the Lannisters. House SilverBone.' Your house. He is very close to finding out the truth. 'Where a girl was shipped off to meet her betrothed, but her ship got attacked by pirates who sold her allegedly to the Dothraki.' He studies your face for any reaction. Any giveaway that it is, indeed, you.

You try to keep him away from it.. 'That is a horrifying tale. I hope it is just a tale and not true.' Except you know all too well that it is true.

He does not believe you. He is busy studying the cloak that covers your shoulders. 'Hmm.' He says. He grabs you by your shoulder and pulls you to his chest. You try to break free, but he already has what he was after. He rips your cloak off on your left shoulder and exposes a small silver moon tattoo with golden lines.

A tradition in your house. They mark their babies and children to avoid kidnapping and ransom. Not that it works, but it is a tradition.

Aemond chuckles. Aegon stares at it, impressed.. You get another idea and try it. Another lie. 'It's a fake one. My parents tried to convince the SilverBones that I was their lost daughter and-'

'Except you aren't, Ayroara.' A guard softly speaks up from the wall he was leaning against. 'I did some questioning. A certain girl was very happy to pay for both information on you and your husband. She does not like foreigners.' He says so mostly to Faybaen, who bites his lips.

You eye Faybaen, and he understands. He drops his smile and gets serious. 'How much gold do you two want to keep quiet?' Faybaens voice is rough and darker.

You hope they take the money and leave. You have no interest in your former house and glory.

'Quiet? We assumed she was dead. The SilverBone heir was sent to Volantis to marry a high slave trader, but House Hightower and House Velayron and even House Targaryen all made marriage proposals.'

You scoff covering yourself with your cloak again. You roll your eyes as well. He is making it sound like it was your fault. 'Take it up with my parents, I was three summers old when I was shipped of like some common whore.'

The guard meanwhile whispers things in Aegons ears, and he chuckles cruelly and nods sometimes. Faybaen keeps biting down his lips. 'When were you going to tell me that you fuck horses?' Aegon grins at Faybaen. Oh no.

You quickly eye Faybaen, and he just scoffs at that common belief before ignoring the king.

Faybaen keeps up his lies. He protects you no matter the costs. 'Hm. I am afraid I don't know much about that, my Prince. Will you take gold, silver, or coins?' He asks.

Aegon gets up and leans in close and studies the neck of Faybaen. He smiles darkly.'Perhaps...Horses?' He jokes. He most certainly knows. Horses are a very common trade way in the Dothraki culture. 'Aemond; we are in the present of royalty. That man here is a Dothraki Khal. He has run away from his Khalasar to wed her, who was his whore.' Aemond looks up suprised by that information.

You shake your head. You were never his whore. He was kind and good to you. He never raped you. Not once. 'I was his gift!' You scream at them in anger.

Aegon shrugs carelessly. 'That is the same thing, darling. You were meant to be his whore. His plaything and his toy. You are lucky he didn't let his horse fuck you first.' He chuckles. 'Speaking of Dothraki things: Your hair damn short and not braided. Were you beaten recently?'

Faybaen gets in Aegons face. The guard surrounded him, so don't grab hold of him yet. 'I am fine with you mocking my culture and my family, but she is off limits.' He groans.

Aegon and Aemond share a long look.'I think I'm going to leave you both a wedding gift. Brother, do you have any ideas?'

You think you know suffering, but what comes out of his mouth is the cruellest thing you ever heard.

'Indeed. Long ago, there was this tradition. Where a king or even a Lord could claim a married maiden's ...virginity.' You. Your virginity. You shake your head and nervously chuckle thinking they are joking. You eye the guards. They vowed to uphold the good. They will never let this happen.

You freeze and tremble. Aemond continues before softly touching your face and staring you down until you shake. 'It was seen as a sign of honour and respect if the king was to bestow his seed upon the bride. Any babies born from it were considered heroes.' He mostly tells his brother, but he keeps his attention on you.

The king licks his lips. 'How lucky you are, Lady SilverBone that I am to bestow you with this gift.' You hear the scoffing in his voice. You growl like an angry cat.

Faybaen pulls his dagger and shields you. But he is outnumbered. Ser Criston and his friends take him into custody and smack him across his face.

You beg Aemond to let the torture stop. 'Let them stop! He is unarmed.' Surely that must do something.

He simply glares at you before nodding to the direction of the smirking king. 'Go to my brother, and I will.' You realise you don't have much of a choice or a say anymore. You wish for the beating to just end.

'Hello, darling.' You don't bow. Aegon grabs your arms and drags you to the bed, throwing you on your back. He grins before letting his hands touch and grab your breasts through the cheap fabric of the dress. He groans when he squeezes you painfully, and you whimper out loud. Faybaen quits fighting the moment he hears your whimpers.

He drops your cloak to the ground and takes off the protective little pins, keeping your dress up. The fabric doubles over exposing your breasts. The king grins and comes closer with his face to your breasts before harshly biting down on your nippels. You smack his head angrily.

He looks up, and is blood coming from his nose. You see the anger in his eyes and gulp. You cower a bit before he grabs your throat and roughly slams you against the board of the bed before ripping your dress open.

The king kisses your lips before forcing his tongue down your throat and roughly squeezing your breasts again. He chuckles when you try to resist and punish you for it by spanking you. 'Faybaen, I am so sorry.' You cry out between the smacks in Dothraki.

Faybaen is very quiet and hangs between the two guards who keep forcing him to watch.

The prince has moved next to you and watches nearly in the trance how you are touched and abused. You scoot away from him.

Your legs are spread open, and they both glance at your wet, soft looking entrance. Aegons fingers eager trace down between your entrance and you gulp soft.

He has a almost pernament smirk on his lips and slams his fingers in you roughly fucking you with pure his hand. You are confused and scared. The other brother grabs your hips and rolls them to the hand making your entire upper body move. He breaths in your ear and kisses your tear stained cheeks.

You do not like how your body likes it. You feel shame and disgust. Aegon grins as his fingers have a small white see through layer of your juice on them. 'Your Khaleesi's cunt sure is tight, Khal. You'll have to do with seconds, or if I see how invested my brother is, maybe even tirths. Perhaps we take her with us and sell her to a brothel. The Savage Queen. That makes a wonderful whore name does it not?' You grunt and try to break free.

Faybaen boils with rage.

'You are both cruel and don't deserve to lay with anyone! She is sweet and innocent. Why are you both torturing her?!' He yells.

Aemond traces a finger down between your legs too and keeps your face still so you are forced to look at him when he does this. He chuckles very softly. 'Because she looks very pretty with her legs spread wide and her cunt bare.' Aegon groans at his torture and wants to make himself the bigger torturer.

He grabs your ankle and drags you to him before taking his clothes off with a annoyed groan and a pant. 'On your knees, Khaleesi.' He mocks you. 'I wish to have you like your husband fucks you. Like a savage.' You don't feel like a khaleesi. You feel scared and unsafe. Just like when you were first introduced to Faybaen.

You obey. Aegon pets your hairs and softly kisses your wet cheeks before muttering some compliments about your body and all the dirty things He will do with you after this. You nod, softly and cling your shaking legs together. Aegon grabs you by your hips and kneels behind you. You lost faith in the gods so you don't bother to pray.

With a chuckle and a very dark twisted grin he enters your body and takes your maidenhead. You grab hold of the edge of the bed to feel a little bit of safety during this unfamiliar and strange event. Your hips are grabbed and pushes to his front with painful shameful trutst and he keeps entering you and you feel as if he is entering you to exit you from the other side out.

He slows down and breaths in your ear before speeding up again. You go up and down with him and softly whimper. 'I am going to make your Khaleesi bleed. She'll be the first Khaleesi to be blessed by a king in Westeros.' Blessed? You don't feel blessed.

You have had enough of his boasting and smack his hands that still rest on your hips. He lets go briefly and slips out. Your body has rest for a moment. 'The great Stallion and both the old gods and the new will damn you, Aegon of house Targaryen. You will die a miserable death.' You promise him.

He is not impressed. Instead he grabs you more roughly and fucks you this time. It is not gentle taking. He shoves himself deep inside you and roughly fucks your body against his. Your body likes it. You feel so disgusting. You enjoy the hard savage sex he gives you. He thinks it's punishment but your body loves it. A little bit of saliva drops down your mouth and he softly changes the rytm.

'So you do talk. I thought that my cock had took your tongue away.' He boasts before softly touching your hairs again.

You try to think of another insult, but Faybaen shakes his head. He does not want you to risk it.

'O, you naughty girl.' The king knows. He knows you are turned on. You lower your head in shame.

'Don't tell him.' You beg soft.

Aegon grins cruelly.

'What? Doesn't your husband deserve to know? I think he does.'

He turns to Faybaen.

'Your wife is enjoying herself. She is wet.' To prove his point, he shows his wet fingers.

You want to explain yourself, but the moment that you do, he takes you again. Your words get caught up in your throat, and only a pathetic little strangled sound comes out. 'Nhn!'

Aegon is stiff. 'This is going to be a little unpleasant. Just be calm.'

You cry out as your head rolls in pleasure. You roll back your hips and let him fuck You. Aegon groans. 'Disgusting savage whore.'

You cry out again this time brief little cries in a row. Both the king and the prince and your husband watches as you discover new foreign emotions and mind states.

You cry out loudly before finding peace and pleasure. Your soaked head is petted. Your legs are grabbed again and a new cock finds itself inside you.

You turn around and see that the prince has decided to also leave you a wedding gift. He pushes your head down and smacks you on your behind. You obey and let him have you your pleasure still high and your body wet and ready for the taking.

He does so, fully pushing himself in. He kisses your cheeks and mutters. They both stretch you out, and you are certain you can not walk tomorrow. You hear yourself grunt as he speeds up and begins trying to get pleasure, too. You are pushed and rocked on the bed that cracks under the two of you. Your legs are hurting, and you feel pain in your neck as well.

You moan in pain and whimper.

'It's been enough! She is hurting.' Faybaen says, trying to break free. His attempt is useless.

Aegon grins and smacks your ass painfully when Aemond is grunting and groaning like a beast. You feel small and little and crawl away to safety. You are dragged back by your feet and pushed back into the position. You drag your nails in the mattress to have some sort of safety.

'A little pain is good for brats like her. Teaches her some manners.'

The prince groans and he feels you up like his brother did before him. He chuckles and smacks your ass painfully. 'We should take her with us.'

You hesitate and shake your head at both of them. 'You did what you wanted. Let us both be now.' You beg.

Aegon sighs before eying Aemond. 'Do you want to tell her, or shall I?' He asks when dressing.

'Tell me, what?' You ask as Faybaen is finally released. He rushes to your side and protects you.

Aegon tells with a little bored chuckle. 'House SilverBone didn't had permission from House Targaryen. In fact; The crown wanted you to become betrothed with someone else. Someone closer to the throne to ensure that we had enough silver for the coming century.' Closer to the throne...

It hits you like a slap in your face. He means himself.

///a/n suffering from the flu here please excuse any errors.

[geographerdose]

Celestial Screenshots Destined for Fame, Pt. 11: Anthony Bourdain

Not a professional astrologer—lowkey spitballing here, doing my own casual and intuitive “analysis” of celeb charts. ⭐️

I was sitting here, feeling behind in life, while I laid on the couch watching No Reservations 👀,

And I was thinking… how old was Anthony Bourdain when season 1 was released in 2005?

49

How old was he when he published his first book in 1995?

39

He got the book advance from Random House in 1990 at the age of 34.

This first book was not successful.

Neither was his second.

In 1998, he became an executive chef.

42

Then in 2000, his book Kitchen Confidential was released and it became a New York Times bestseller.

44

In 2002, the Food Network offered him his own show A Cook’s Tour that ran until 2003. (note to self: find this)

46

What did you say? It got me curious about the MC in his natal chart?

Why, yes, it did:

Alright, alright, alriiiiight

Here we have the MC in Taurus at 0 degrees

Ruler of the MC is Venus in Gemini 28 degrees

Conjunct the Sun in Cancer 3 degrees ☀️⭐️

And co-present with Mercury in Gemini 12 degrees

🫒Can we just unload these four things for a second? Taurus talks about food and it’s with the planet of communication but not only that it has the ruler on its side in the eleventh house of groups/house of Good Spirit. No wonder he became a food influencer/writer and chef.

🫒I noticed there is a superior square from Mars in Pisces to Venus and the Sun since Venus actually falls under the beams of the Sun but Mars doesn’t. Mars has the upper hand and is capable of doing the most damage here in addition to being under the beams which is typically seen as negative.

🫒It’s shy by one degree and I think that saves his career because obviously he has had a very successful career. Actually Mars is the only planet not as harmed being under the beams so maybe the Sun conjunct Venus forms this “body” that Mars’ rays strike as one instead of two bodies. Idk that’s probably not how it works, lol, I’m just spitballing here. But I think that in a strange way the Sun-Mars situation, despite how bad it looks, somehow is actually fortunate for Venus (and thus his MC/career).

🫒But no the Suns influence too I feel can kind of show some false starts in regards to the first two books not doing so good then the third one becoming a bestseller. There’s something here with that bc I think Al Pacino and the king of R&B had similar experiences.

🫒The trine to MC’s ruler by the Fama asteroid def ups the fame factor too 😎

🫒Oh shit— do you see how Venus is opposing his North Node?? Talk about great things in regards to career since Venus rules his MC

ALSO I think there’s reception happening there, even if it’s not a planet — energy of the MC is that of the Venus variety simply being in Taurus, that which Venus rules💫

🫒Also like idk I just find it funny that like the Fortuna asteroid is squaring the Fortune lot 😆 seems fortunate 🥴

🫒Wow there’s a lot going on in regards to that MC

🫒Let’s back up for a minute. He has a day chart so Mars is going to do the most damage and it actually has the upper hand in his chart. And with it maltreating the ruler of his MC, it definitely was not an instant road to success for him but nonetheless he wound up becoming a massive influencer and trailblazer with his unique insight and authenticity.

🫒That Sun conjunction is not surprising given his massive fame but it’s still cool to see it poking out as confirmation as it has in so many charts of celebs before.

🫒Okay so my whole point at looking at his chart was to see if he had Saturn influence based on traditional markers of success, like publishing a book or getting your own show— coming later I life. I am sure he had many other successes, more important successes, at many different ages as I know he struggled with addiction but I guess I was coming into this from an ego-based perspective of “I haven’t achieved this by my age yet” and sort of like beating myself up about it.

🫒And then I just got lost in reading his chart.

🫒⭐️But yes there is Saturn influence— a very loose sign-based opposition to his MC. I think this accounts for like the later age in traditional markers of success. Basically trying to make myself feel better and that there’s still time for me to reach traditional markers of success.

🫒Honestly, for him, maybe it was best that he achieved fame and great success later in life as he did struggle with addiction and could have potentially lost it all due to that but because he went through that and healed it before becoming very successful, he was able to withstand good grace and longevity in his fame and success. ⭐️

He was so hot. 🥹🥹🥹

[empressofthelibrary]

I was venting about my morning to one of my friends at work, and mentioned losing a chunk of Takeoff. She followed up later:

"so what's this book you're writing about? Is it a children's story?"

And I froze for a second because how do I explain this?

"Uh, no," I replied. "I mean, it's definitely not a children's story. It's also a fanwork, meaning I'm using someone else's characters."

She seemed confused on this part, but let me go on.

"It's about this girl... She moves to a new city and then... Well, she finds out she's half space-alien" -- my coworker laughed in surprise at this -- "and then she gets stabbed, cursed by a ghost, the museum she works at burns down..." -- coworker's eyes are getting bigger and bigger with every new situation I am putting this character in -- "...and then the suit of armor the ghost lives in gets stolen, so she has to track it down to break the curse. This girl is just having a horrible week."

At this point my coworker looks absolutely bewildered. I guess I give the impression of someone who writes, like, coffeeshop AU syrupy fluff and literally nothing else, idk. I didn't even get to the fight with Weather Wizard or the giant robot laser dinosaur mecha Bailey's currently fighting, because those would take too much context to explain, and this coworker has nothing but like, some cultural osmosis for a baseline here. It's like the xkcd comic, you know the one.

And then the inevitable question: "...so are you gonna publish it? Make some money?"

I considered telling her I'm putting it up for free on the Internet. But then I realized she might want the link. And I remembered all the cussing. And Bailey having a small conniption over being rescued by an illegally gorgeous stranger who rides a motorcycle. And getting mad at herself for being kind of into it. And the fact that there is probably a lot about my psyche on display here. And that I was talking to a very traditional, very Christian, older lady. And ALL THE SHIT that happens later on.

"Nnnnnno," I half-lied. "It's a fanwork, so I can't monetize it. But I think I like keeping my writing as a hobby anyway! There's no pressure, and I can make stuff that's just for me!"

She seemed surprised by this answer, but satisfied, which was a relief. I do not need my Work Mom to see my secrets bleeding through onto the page, holy shit