#if Lonan knew harrison HAD THIS THOUGHT

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

you’re in his DMs like “you have pretty eyes” and I’m telling him “your eyes are a private ocean meant only for you & the person lucky enough to look into them”

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Holy Ground | Hallowed Bodies Update #1

LONAN CLARK ERA LONAN CLARK ERA!! Welcome to instalment 1 of the Hallowed Bodies updates! :) HB is a literary fiction novella I finished in August (WIP intro) and a companion to BODY BACK.

Let's talk about magical beginnings, how life impacts writing, grieving potentials, & Lonan's internality!

Update under the cut!

Logline: When his girlfriend leaves to travel, Lonan carries out his typical daily routine which includes visiting a church and walking a strange route home.

Hallowed Bodies taglist (pls ask to be +/-):

@subtlefires @dallonwrites @saintedseraph @cream-and-tea @rownanisntwriting @euphoniouspandemonium @iwannawritepls @thefruitonyourfly @olive-riggzey @silassghost @thelivingdeceased

Beginnings & more beginnings

When I got the original idea for Hallowed Bodies, it was March and I was on the other side of the country at the intersection in front of my old apartment building. It was raining on my walk home from a journalism class and I was listening to My Dying Spirit by Greyson Chance when I had the thought... "okay if Harrison is alone in Las Vegas in BODY BACK, that must mean LONAN is also alone for a while in Las Vegas--so what's he doing?"

For about two days, I was really consumed with the idea of what this book *could* be--eerie church imagery, a contemplation of faith, an exploration of Lonan's relationship with his dead mother. Then time passed, I moved, life got weird, I finished BODY BACK, and by the time I got back to HB, something in me had changed.

When life changes writing & grieving potentials

I've given that preamble because HB didn't turn into the thing I thought it would turn into on that initial walk back home. I think there's sometimes a tendency in writing advice spaces to be so blasé about how life circumstances impact writing. I don't think there was any possible way June 2023 me could've written the Hallowed Bodies I'd dreamt up back in March 2023. I changed SO much despite staying fundamentally the same and the idea also had to change because *I'm* the one writing it.

With that said, sometimes I wonder what would've happened if I stayed exactly where I was in the spring (which is an extremely Lonan and Harrison-core thing to consider LOL). In a way, a big part of writing this book was grieving what it could've been. I still have a distinct vibe of the early vision which is very similar but adjacent nonetheless to what I actually wrote. I think that's what made writing this project so hard because I didn't understand what I wanted from it--March me was conflicting with June me and in the end, what we got was a mixture of both!

A positive start... for now!!!

I've always heard of writers talk about "shiny new idea syndrome" but I never really understood it. However, drafting Holy Ground completely clarified what shiny new idea syndrome even is which left me feeling perhaps overly confident (honestly which I'm grateful for because I didn't feel that way again until the last chapter LOLLL).

I drafted the first paragraph of this book back in April, and the rest of it only took a day or two in June. It's very short (for me) at 1500 words and illuminated two structural elements for HB: short chapters and "vignette"-like scenes.

Inspiration & vibes:

Okay so SORRY if you already know this but Greyson Chance got me unwise & his music video for My Dying Spirit is MY FAVOURITE THING IN THE WHOLE WORLD. I always thought of MDS as a really solid Lonan song, but the music video's Catholic imagery had me spiraling MORE. I basically wanted to recreate the vibes of that video in the form of a book.

We were really going for THIS as the vibe (from the video)!

Hallowed Bodies as Antithesis

One of the first things I knew about HB was that I wanted it to be a mirror of BODY BACK. I wanted to see how Lonan got to be a better person BEFORE FH in contrast to how Harrison becomes a worse person before FH. Thinking of Hallowed Bodies as the antithesis of BB is really fascinating to me! If BB is loud, HB is quiet. If BB is maximalist, HB is minimalist (as much as I could help it haha).

Internal narratives as a trap

Something I LOVE about this project in general is that it's SO internal. I don't think I've ever been so deeply rooted in Lonan's voice before, but Hallowed Bodies as a project warrants intimacy. Lonan's alone for a week in Las Vegas basically doing nothing, which is a precursor to Feeding Habits (the novel that comes after this) where he's really "settled" into being a completely subordinate person in his own life.

I wanted to use internality as a means to make the narrative feel confined, like Lonan does. Because of that, I focused on adding a LOT of descriptions that directly reflect Lonan's desires and internal conflicts (the excerpt with the couple reflects this the most). What he notices is EXTREMELY important. What do his observations reveal about him?

Listlessness and Lonan

Something that became clear to me early in the drafting process is that Lonan is soooo listless. Like direction? Drive? Passion? He has NOTHINGGGG. He's really living a settled, "domestic" life, and he clearly can't handle it. This is setup for Feeding Habits so it's not as intense as it is there, but this man is BORED and ready to romanticize ANYTHING for some serotonin. This is critical setup for later when we meet "the man" (whose name for efficiency's sake is Dallas bc he looks like Matt Dillon in The Outsiders <3 that was the reason <3).

HB is a really transitional project for Lonan. He comes off Moth Work a better person to others but not quite a better person to himself. We get to see him crave gentleness a LOT in HB, a feeling that seems so foreign to him, which I think also contributes to his feeling of displacement. In a way, it was also transitional for me--it's the first thing I've written in full as a graduate!

The plot

CW: religious trauma (Catholicism)

Scene A:

In a church, Lonan recalls a memory of him and his father praying.

Scene B:

Lonan starts his walk home, aware the route is nonsensical.

Scene C:

Lonan recalls the last time he saw Eliza before she left for her week-long trip.

Scene D:

Lonan considers Las Vegas' warm autumn.

Scene E:

In memory, Eliza finds Lonan's father's rosary in her apartment.

Excerpts:

The first "scene" (aka vignette). This is one of my favourite openings EVER!!! It's just Hallowed Bodies core!

Lonan doesn’t pray anymore. At least not the way he used to. As a child, he and his father prayed everywhere: begging for forgiveness at Crater Lake, repenting in line for an oil change, supplicating in a windstorm. On Sundays, they’d wake before dawn and nestle in front of the bathroom mirror, recite the first chapter of Genesis, Paul’s letters to Timothy, Psalm 22. Lonan preferred the Apostle’s Creed. He’d watch his young mouth repeat I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, and he did believe. After hours of this, sunlight misting the open window, mass a half hour away, their lips would be so numb they’d have to pinch them until they were bloody mouthed and ready, at last, for God. The truth is, Lonan believes in nothing now. He’s as fatherless as he is motherless as he is godless. This should be a good thing. But bowed against a pew, the church around him hollow like Jesus’ empty tomb, his eyes trained on the dangling crucifix ahead of him, he’s certain this is wrong. He needs a mentor, a shepherd, an idol. He needs someone to follow.

This is the second scene/vignette. Something I love here is that we can tell Lonan's a hopeless romantic lol. Like hey you're looking awfully fondly at that couple, why?? You want that?? You want love?? Also! If you read the recent Changing States excerpt, you'll notice I also mention a café in the arts district which is an easter egg to say Lonan and Jeremiah love the same café (they need to be friends):

He takes the long way home. The long way home entails cutting past a wedding chapel near Lewis until he nears a second wedding chapel by a dollar store. He then turns around and retraces his steps back to the church, then walks all the way to a café bakery in the arts district where he stands and watches patrons from across the street. A man always meets a woman. They swipe off milk foam mustaches, lean against each other to fill out a crossword. The sun sometimes hits their faces and pales their eyes till they’re transparent like vapour. They never walk out together. He leaves the moment the first one goes, then continues back to the church where he finally walks ten minutes to Eliza’s place. The walk takes over an hour. It’s inefficient. Nonsensical. He makes this route every day.

This is just such a typical Lonan and Eliza interaction:

She’d left groceries in the fridge—no need to go shopping—and if he wanted, she’d also left a fifty-dollar bill on the counter for takeout. As he stared at the ceiling, she kissed him and complained about her mother’s plans to go horseback riding that coming weekend. “I know what a horse looks like,” she said, then explained they’d also be touring Stowe with a gaudy tourism agency. “She’s exhausting me already.” She sighed, having gone completely still. Lonan didn’t notice until she took his face with her hand, squishing his jaw, and asked “Are you okay?” An hour later, she was gone with a pre-packed suitcase, and he was still lying in bed wondering if she’d been there at all, if he’d been there at all, if in actuality they were both dead, or at the very least, both ghosts.

Do you fear bodies of water to the point where you practice holding your breath in full sinks so if you're ever close to drowning at least you're prepared:

It’s September in Las Vegas. The asters that grow outside Eliza’s apartment building have started to bloom, shockingly purple. The severe summer heat has barely faded, weather Lonan isn’t used to. Sometimes he crouches right in front of Eliza’s oscillating fan so it blows right in his face. At other times he ruffles up the freezer until he finds something suitable to drape on his forehead—a bag of peas, a Ziploc of homemade perogies, a hard plastic ice pack Eliza almost always forgets to return after work. Though sometimes, he cranks the bathroom sink all the way to cold and fills it up, sticks his face in there like it’s nothing, waits there for what feels like a few hours.

Lonan examining how fucking weird dating Eliza is lol:

Eliza doesn’t know about his visits to the church. He started his daily trips about two weeks back, ensuring he got home before she did from a shift. As they ate canned beef stew on the couch, as she spoke to him about an irritating coworker, as she rested her hand on his elbow then looked at her bedroom door, he kept this secret from her. He’s not sure why. He knows he doesn’t have to. Eliza already knows his father was devout to something—on the last day of August, she rummaged through a filing cabinet in her bedroom and pulled out a bronze rosary. Lonan didn’t need to look at it to know who it belonged to. He’d learned to identify it by scent alone. “That’s your dad’s,” she said, something sober in her voice. She was essentially providing him a confession—a crime she unknowingly participated in. The rosary dangled like fuzzy dice from a rear-view mirror. When he didn’t move from where he leaned in the doorway, she stood and pocketed it. “I didn’t know. He gave it to me when…” Her voice trailed off when she realized he still hadn’t reacted. What had she expected from him? He’s not wholly illogical—he’d accepted that his father had likely given her things and that she’d kept them. They’d dated. That was normal.

^^ (IS IT NORMAL THO I COULD WRITE A TAG ESSAY ON THIS)

Eliza backtracks (CW: implied abuse, blood mention):

Eliza promised she’d go through all her things—make sure she didn’t have anything else “from Jason.” Hearing his father’s name said aloud like that was a normal thing felt even stranger than having his rosary. Lonan took a step back that was really more a stagger; he narrowly caught himself on the bedroom doorframe. His cheeks were hot—with embarrassment, but also tears, and the tears worsened the embarrassment which worsened the tears. He couldn’t explain to her that when he was too young to memorize a phone number, that rosary had been wrapped around his hand till his fingers turned blue. Or that one silty night, he’d clutched the cross so tight under his pillow that his palms bled. “Sorry,” he said, pawing at his eyes.

The aftermath of that scene:

In the end, he sat on the balcony, silently crying as he stared out over the city. He tried to think of ways to reverse time—perhaps if he pretended nothing happened, Eliza would too. They’d start the afternoon all over again, her kicking off her shoes at the front door, setting her purse down on the small dining table. “You want to grab dinner?” she would’ve shouted through the apartment, already fumbling for the coupons she’d tacked to the refrigerator, knowing he was listening to her. Instead, he stared at his trembling fist.

And the last paragraph of this chapter! (Lonan really said "I don't have thoughts stop bothering me")

He needs to eat something. There’s raw celery in the vegetable crisper. A new pack of whole wheat tortillas atop the toaster. It’s when he’s pulling them out to eat, the low static hum of a radio station left on gritting midair, that he realizes perhaps that’s exactly it—he can’t tell Eliza about the church. Not because she won’t care, but precisely because she will. She’d follow him every time he goes, ask what he was thinking of every time he bowed his head to pray. He doesn’t know what he thinks. Most of the time he isn’t thinking at all. But what he knows for certain is the church and his meandering walk, that couple in the café, the fact that one always leaves, are not just routine for him. This is his holy ground. Luminous, alive. Somewhere to flee, even when he’s not sure what he’s running from.

And that's it! I'm really excited to introduce y'all more officially to Hallowed Bodies! :) And because I vowed to make these updates feel more cozy, here's this Lonancore gif LOL:

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Find the words tag (2!)

Tagged by @encrucijada! <3 <3 Hallowed Bodies edition!

YELLOW LEMONY:

Literary fiction bitches will use any word to describe the colour instead of the colour itself (/aff):

In one, Jesus sits alone in a jade field, a lamb tucked by his ankles. The sky behind him is a watery cyan, interrupted by a flock of doves. In another, his head is spoked by shards of lemony light, and he’s on the cross, yes, but sparkling anyway.

(the way I knew I didn't have a yellow but that I had a lemony too LOL)

CLOUD:

This is how Lonan experiences crushes LOL:

But still, a web of warmth overtakes him—someone has thought of him. And not just someone, but the man. The man who’s spent his time invested in an issue no one but Lonan should be invested in. The man whose body beat so close to his yesterday it felt like ascending somewhere the skies are cloudless, somewhere people pray as a good thing instead of as a means to an end.

SPARKLE:

He's down bad:

Over an americano, Lonan confesses everything, which might be a premature decision but it’s ninety-one degrees out and because he didn’t order something iced, he’s sweating through his button-up, which makes him self-conscious and therefore overcompensatingly honest, and in any regard, the man’s eyes are sparkly like cubic zirconia which might be the sole reason he’s talking at all.

SAND:

Technically quicksand:

He could start by saying last year he fell in love with someone who reminds him of spun sugar and quicksand and cinnamon hearts and chopped firewood even though those details aren’t relevant or maybe they are more than ever because he and Harrison can be in exile together on this one, both failing to know where his sister is.

open tag bc I NEED TO RUN TO AN APPT BUT PLS DO THIS IF YOU WANNA with the words: heat, mouth, water, gold.

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

why is body back called body back 👀

So I have this funny thing where I can’t really write something without a title (one of my favourite singers said this once years ago and I was like ??? couldn’t be me & now it’s me lol), so the minute I figured out I wanted to write BB, I headed to my book titles document. I literally just went through the list till I found one that vaguely worked with the themes LMAO and that was BB! I originally thought I’d come up with this title for a poem about me, but I realized that may have been the goal, but that actual title comes from a line in Seventh Virtue (in Reeve’s POV).

She’s not sure how the realization comes to him. If she’s that translucent now, unable to hold her own secrets like she’s unable to hold wine or her own body back.

This is from the penultimate chapter!

Anyway, how I view it in BB, it’s about how can Harrison, after this really destructive romance, find his body back. He doesn’t really feel alive in BB, & struggles to even connect to himself physically post-Lonan. BB is like an oath to himself & indicates a sense of vengefulness. I title dropped it in 24k Harrison with that idea in mind.

To see the BB drop we also need to see the “body gone” drop that prompts Harrison to even think about the phrase “body back.”

And where is [Jeremiah] now? In the artificial light, Harrison hunts for him too—but he’s not in the unhinging bathroom stalls, not in the teal grout, the running sinks, and maybe he never existed at all, missing like Jesus in the tomb—body gone, body gone, body gone.

The above line is inspired by a poem I wrote (WHICH funnily is about the weekend I started writing BB in my freezing apartment lmaooo) where I talked about the stolen body hypothesis (which is v interesting if you haven’t looked into it). I recycled that here because Jesus is such a huge part of Harrison’s psychology in BB. While googling bits of his burial, etc, I came across this line from Wikipedia:

“Although Jesus' body had been laid out in the tomb after crucifixion and death, the tomb is found to be empty, the body gone…”

That phrase “body gone” was like YES PERFECT—I hadn’t thought about title dropping BB until that point but “body gone” and “body back” seemed like a match made in heaven. This idea of “body gone” repeats for a second time and which leads us to the BB drop:

He approaches the mirror, jolts at the way he touches himself—more carefully than he’s ever been touched before. Who are you? he wants to say. He’d like to leave this place now, the club, Las Vegas, the earth. He’d like to buy himself a pet tarantula, run off a cliffside, eat a tub of ice cream with his bare hands. Why did he come here again? His mind is so quiet. This could be peace. But who is he? In Jeremiah’s bathroom he knew, but now there’s this stranger ahead of him, the person who must be him—someone’s chandelier earring grazing his jaw, the cowboy hat lopsided, mascara running down his cheeks even though he hasn’t cried. Where did you go? he mouths, but he knows. He’s disappeared also like Jesus in the tomb, his limbs vanishing one by one, his skin melting off his hands—body gone, body gone, body gone. He grabs his cheeks, panicked because he’s on fire, gold tossed into the crucible. He’s going to burn to ash. He’s going to need a burial soon. His face has been stolen, his breastbone and knuckles too. A month ago, someone spat him into a basket like his body was ripe for the offertory—body gone, body gone, body gone.

“Back,” Harrison says, nose grazing the spattered mirror. His chest swells, and maybe he is burning, and maybe he’s right here, hidden somewhere in the pinprick of his reflection. “Back,” he repeats. He isn’t thoughtful. He isn’t profound. Maybe that’s fine. He squeezes his tear-duct, sticks out his tongue. He’ll die eventually, let his body disappear, but not right now. “Body back, body back, body back.”

Basically, Harrison hates the idea of “body gone” because he KNOWS his body is “gone” too, disappeared in an interaction with the alleged divine (Lonan lol). He’s looking at himself for the FINAL time in 24kH (and remember, he does this A LOT in this chapter, so this is just an even bigger moment for him), and he doesn’t see someone he knows. He’s seeing a really hollow stranger & he asks himself “where did you go?” but knows already—his body is gone, part of it left with Lonan.

And he REALLY doesn’t like that. Hence, then muttering “body back, body back, body back” because he’s like “NO, my body is not gone, it is BACK, I am getting it back—it’s MINE now.”

Tooootally making a podcast episode on this lol tysm!

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

velvet pumpkin for the ask game?

bless you for your patience lol! thanks for asking :)

velvet pumpkin: what do you like describing the most when it comes to scene dressing? share an excerpt

ooooh, I'm not sure I've ever thought of what I like to describe most. Probably the sky & anything actually in the sky like the sun, moon, stars, etc. I think because it's such a vast part of the environment, it's what I think of first!

This is a Lonan & Harrison sky excerpt from early Seventh Virtue:

Lonan had already set the station to Harrison’s favourite—throwbacks. As Harrison flailed to cheap 80s disco beats, Lonan stayed intently focused on the road. It was kind of amusing, how serious he was, making perfect turns, perfect stops. Night trimmed Manhattan’s skyline; the blue silvered Lonan’s skin.

“Do you ever smile?” Harrison joked, tempted to reach over and poke Lonan’s statue face. Of course, he knew this to be true—if anything, Harrison was the only person Lonan smiled around often. Otherwise, he was a clean slate of marble.

^ I forgot about this, it's actually so cute LOL

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Please tell us more about Seventh Virtue–we need more? Also what was your general thought process for writing this right now?

Hello!! Seventh Virtue is the fantastical version of the Fostered series (which I’ve been writing for many years as you probably already know)! I came up with the initial idea for this project back in the summer of 2019, but knew I’d probably never write it because at the time, I couldn’t see myself writing beyond literary fiction (and also: I know nothing about fantasy :)) in fact I think I’ve only ever read 3 fantasy books from the same series and that was years ago)!

This led to why I’m writing it right now, actually! Earlier this week, my sister and I binge watched Shadow and Bone and it reminded me of this project (which I’d called Fostered But It’s Magic haha). I couldn’t help but delve more and more into the project as the days progressed, and so I decided I’d try to draft it. I actually tried to draft this project once before as a screenplay because I thought it’d translate better to screen, but gave up FAST when I realized I am terrible at screenwriting! With this in mind, I knew I wanted to write this project, but I’m also impatient, and know I want to write more things this summer. TBH, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my vacation writing another Fostered book (I planned to write something outside of this universe but apparently it doesn’t want me to??) so yesterday at 1AM, I came up with a very... stupid idea to write 10k words in one day.

I made this decision strictly for anxiety exposure. I’m exporting the vlog where I chat about this experience so I won’t delve too much into it. TL;DR: I wrote 11k words yesterday, and finished the first chapter (almost done the second).

So what’s the book about?? Honestly, it’s pretty loose right now. This is the pitch I wrote way back in 2019, which is more or less accurate:

After being tormented by nightmares of his ex lover, which result in violent hot flashes and an inability to keep up a job, Harrison seeks a magical intervention. When the clairvoyant he hopes will cure his strange ailment turns out to be a con woman—and his old friend, Reeve—he is thrown back into the past and forced to rekindle relationships he thought he’d left behind.

The main thing that’s surprised me since drafting is how contemporary this world is?? Despite being literally fantasy, this setting is the most contemporary-aligned compared to the rest of the series. Fostered book 1-6 take place in a sort of dystopia (which gets softer and softer as the books continue), whereas Moth Work and Feeding Habits take place in older-contemporary times (2006)! This book on the other hand I could certainly see taking place in some sort of alternate 2019 (because we :) cannot include the pandemic years :)). It’s also magnificently funny?? I feel really blessed to have just decided to write this book. I know about 10% of what is going on at all times, but it’s so fun to draft!

Something I didn’t expect initially was how big a presence Foster would have in this book! I kind of :) forgot about Foster in Moth Work/Feeding Habits (so sorry he is still an icon), and while I knew he’d be Harrison’s roommate, I kind of assumed he’d be a side character?? But no, he said, I am reclaiming my “Main Cast” title and you can do nothing to stop me. For the majority of what I’ve written, Harrison and Foster are living in the past. This is because Foster can ~time travel, but is incredibly ethical and sustainable, so he refuses to actually change the past/do anything that would affect the present/future. After a hex goes wrong and results in Harrison’s mother getting into an accident and eventually disappearing, Harrison’s life is in literal shambles. Tormented by nightmares and hot flashes, he is NOT living his best life. To cope, Foster agrees to take them back to the past where he can relive the last 5 days before his mother’s accident, thinking they will only stay there for that one week. But when they’ve repeated the same week dozens of time, Foster ups the pressure on Harrison to give him the okay to head back to the present. And when these “hot flashes”/nightmares get even worse, Foster tells Harrison about a “healer” who cured his broken wrist (so he could plant his tomatoes lol), Harrison concedes and they finally head back to present day so he too can visit this woman, who is actually their old friend, Reeve.

This book is SO angsty and hilarious! I think my favourite thing about it is that I get to write Lonan and Harrison falling in love again lol, which I didn’t exactly get to experience in the conventional way (the first time around). By the time we meet Lonan (who is introduced in book 2), he and Harrison already have a pretty complex relationship. This relationship gets even more tangled in book 3, and book 5 is where we get to see the first glimpses of a romance. Somewhere in this timeline, between books 3-5, they ~fell in love, but I don’t know when! I think most of that occurred off the page, so even I don’t know. What’s so fun is now I get to glimpse into that a little bit more. Their relationship is my favourite thing and always has been, about this entire series, so I’m so stoked to finally get to dabble with it from the beginning. All I really know at the moment is that they meet because Lonan catches Harrison being a thief lol so, so much fun tension already to work with!

I’m not sure if I’ll finish this, mostly because the prospect of writing an 80k novel sort of terrifies me?? The project is almost 12k at the moment, and we really have only scratched the very surface, so we’ll see! I haven’t written genre fiction in so long and I’m adoring this! It’s also so much less strenuous than writing literary lols so perfect because I’m still a little wiped out after my semester ended!

Here’s an excerpt when Harrison meets up with Reeve for the first time:

The shop’s name is The Lark’s Lagoon. When he enters, a string of freshwater shells clatter, like bells would. She is not at the table like she was in the past, so he putters around the shop. Some of the things she sells are silly. Plastic mood rings that are clearly heat activated and more suited for a child but marketed to women in their thirties. Ping pong balls with the inscription enchanted aims. Snowglobes with a miniature witch figurine who says I’ll tell your fortune when you shake it.

“That’s a bestseller.” Her voice comes so suddenly that Harrison drops the globe. It shatters across the floor in a glittery bundle. “So you’re going to need to pay for that.”

Harrison describing Lonan lol:

Harrison hated him. He was cute, but Harrison hated him.

Harrison chilling in his timeloop where he can’t be seen:

It’s harder avoiding birds than he thinks. Every time one spots him, his body lurches, magnetized in the direction of the apartment. If it weren’t for the trees he latches onto along the way, he’d already be back at the brownstone listening to Foster lecture him on not being seen and not exploiting his magic. So he becomes more careful. Checks every direction—up down, left, right, diagonally, whatever—until he is certain no one can see him.

Some Stressed Foster dialogue lol I love him protect him at all costs:

“How many times have I told you that you cannot be seen in the timeloop? I woke up with a migraine five minutes ago and when I went to find you, realized you’d slipped out. Do you know how my brain feels when you stretch the timeloop like that? It feels like someone’s cracking it. My brain, a walnut. You, a nutcracker. Not to mention, you didn’t even leave a note. What if you were robbed? Or murdered? What if they dismembered you and I had no idea?

so that’s this project! don’t see any reason to stop writing it, so I’ll make an update on it soon! :) let me know if you have any more q’s!

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Weeping Statue | Feeding Habits Update #6 & let’s chat about quitting writing

Hello! Are we back for another Feeding Habits update (finally)?? Let’s chat chapter 7, Weeping Statue.

Just a reminder: This is my original work and plagiarism of any form will not be tolerated.

Can we talk about struggle? Because this chapter was IT. I believe I started it in late July and finished it earlier this month. I’ve taken my time with chapters before, but this was next level--the amounts of changes I went through in one chapter was astronomical, and reminded me of drafting chapter three earlier in the summer. I went through so many stages writing this chapter: from enjoying it, to feeling no joy from writing at all, to nearly quitting this book altogether!

Scene A:

Harrison and his mother Suzanna simultaneously avoid each other over breakfast after he failed to return home the night previous

She lowkey calls him out (calling out his denial of missing Lonan)

Scene B:

Harrison goes to a farmhouse owned by Theodore Harvey, a friend of his mother’s, to drop off the rescued litter of kittens from chapter 6. He realizes he is missing one kitten and concludes Reeve has stolen one after dinner the night previous.

Scene C:

Harvey invites Harrison inside for coffee where he admits his coffee machine is broken.

Harrison fixes the coffee machine, and is hired by Harvey to flip the rest of the farmhouse as he and his wife are moving.

Scene D:

On his way home, Harrison stops at a gas station where he buys a bouquet of tulips for his mother, a dog collar for the puppy he found in the kitten litter, a pack of gum, pastries, and sunscreen before heading to a beach.

At the onset of a lightning storm, Harrison swims in the ocean and has an epiphany--he decides to accept his miserable life (a development!)

Scene E:

After the beach ordeal, Harrison returns to his apartment ready to accept the plainness of his daily life when an old ghost from his past (his! ex!) Lonan appears to be having dinner with Suzanna

This chapter brought so many things. A) many... breakdowns lol (I cried a lot!), B) many false epiphanies that wound me back into ruts, C) a desire to quit this series that was just as terrifying as it sounds and D) an ideology I never would’ve gotten on my own. Just have to thank my sister Sarah for telling me a few weeks ago after I insisted that I knew what needed to logically happen but couldn’t write it no matter how hard I tried. She said: “It’s not about what works, it’s about what you want” << literally changed my philosophy on writing, even as someone who tries their best to advocate for care and enjoyment in writing. Not sure if it’s because of the timing when she said this, but I’d probably never had made it out of the rut without having this said to me.

I was *not* planning at all to have my boys reunite so soon in the book. Technically, it is not very soon and we are almost done the book, but for some reason, I really didn’t think it would work so early because I felt Harrison’s POV was so undeveloped already (I still think it is). HOWEVER, the fact of the matter is: it was not working at all. I knew exactly what I needed to do to get to point A to Z but the thing about writing is, it is not formulaic! I tried to make fit what I thought worked, but as time progressed and I immensely struggled, less and less did I want what worked. Writing was miserable and that’s not what I want writing to be for me. So I took Sarah’s advice, and I did what would make me happy, and that was, and has always been, seeing my boys interact.

Now that I’ve finished this chapter, I’m not sure if I made the right decision! I have yet to write the boys interacting so I don’t know if it will work, but what I liked about this method is that it freed me from this constriction I’d written myself into and opened a new avenue to do something that DOESN’T “work” for the story but that does work for me. To me, this project, this series, is more important to me than making something “work”. Sustaining my health and happiness (which were declining on the path I was on) is critical for me and my writing journey.

EDIT: by the time I’m editing this post, I have written the boys interacting and haha yep this was the right decision! Was doubting myself for a sec, added in a lil robbery, and now it’s all good (oops)

Excerpts:

I don’t have too many for you because this chapter does need an edit to “set” it in place (right now it feels like liquid Jello that has been in the fridge but is yet to set up). I know it needs one more scene but I cannot :) write :) what :) it :) needs :) no matter how hard I have tried, and so I am giving that section of the story a break instead of over-kneading it and toughening up the dough unnecessarily.

Here is part of the opening scene! There are things I don’t like about this but I am trying not to self-hate, so !!!

The next morning, Harrison gets up at dawn to drop the kittens off at the farm, and Suzanna makes coffee for one. This is unusual for both—Harrison rarely leaves the apartment, and Suzanna always makes coffee for two. In his room, Harrison combs his hair and twists his earring, its blue gem pearling in dribbles of sunlight. In the kitchen, Suzanna stirs coffee like it’s wronged her. Harrison dabs cologne onto his throat and blinks off his hangover. Suzanna flecks her spoon onto the tabletop so it leaves an egg of amber on the surface.

When he approaches the kitchen, Harrison pretends he does not see his mother and his mother pretends she does not see him. They move like this, repelled, one moving left, the other moving right, one opening the top cupboard, the other opening the bottom.

Harrison stops at a convenience store and buys a hodge-podge of things (also the beach scene which yes mirrors the last scene in Lonan’s POV hehe I indulge myself):

He picks up the best bouquet of fuchsia tulips, a collar for the dog he left in his bedroom even though it’ll be weeks until she’s big enough to fit in it, a pack of spearmint gum he doesn’t need, a package of pastries, and a tube of sunscreen—SPF 30. He almost drops every item at least once on his way up to the register, and definitely drops them when his receipt is spitting from the machine and the store clerk says she likes his earring—is it vintage—and he nearly vomits in the parking lot, trained against the hood of the taxi—is it even his taxi—the plastic bag teetering from his wrist, rain coiling against his cheek, the air so humid, his clothes so heavy, it is no wonder the next place he ends up is the beach.

It is never smart to swim during a storm. If he thinks hard enough, his mother’s voice warns him to keep from the shore, stand behind the yellow line, stay safe, stay where you are, don’t run under a tree, and even more, don’t run into the water. He does everything wrong in an even worse order—dollops sunscreen into his palm before opening the pastry so his teeth freckles with zinc, chews the gum and the pastry at the same time so his tongue becomes a slime of crumbs, rests the tulips too close to the shoreline so they wilt under a wave, misplaces the dog collar in his own left hand, and dives into the water fully-clothed.

Harrison getting very angsty about Lonan’s future (which he’s predicted completely wrong haha):

He will die alone. Reeve will not think of him again and he will deserve that. Somewhere in the city with the missing kitten, drinking bottles of holy water because there is no drink more fitting for a woman so sacred. His mother will miss him only briefly, and then return to her daily life of no longer needing to clean up after him. Maybe she’ll find the tulips. Put them on display until they wither, then use their carcasses as fertilizer. Save electricity. Use the coffee machine less. Downsize to a smaller, cheaper, prettier apartment with arched walkways and stained-glass windows. Harvey will think he is a fluke who missed his first day of work and will never think of him again. The dog isn’t old enough to recognize him. Suzanna will give her the collar. And Lonan will continue his life in Las Vegas, tottering after Eliza, refilling her wine, getting neon at house parties, watching French silent films without captions because he’s probably learned another language, cut his hair, gotten a tattoo, learned how to cross-stitch, bought life insurance, a yacht, a coastal summer home, learned how to play the mandolin, perfected his lamb sous vide. He’s probably married. Him and Eliza family-planning. He’ll expand a future, and Harrison will do the opposite. There is something freeing in being unmissed.

Lightning snaps across the sky like a wishbone, sounds like the prick of tambourines from under the water. Everything turns violet—the clouds, his skin, the waves. Tomorrow will be a better day, as he sinks lower into the current, tomorrow will be a better day, as the light fades and dissolves into blackness, tomorrow will be a better day, as seaweed wraps his throat, as the freezing water impales his ribs, as he burrows under and simultaneously, rises up.

This next part comes right after!

In the stomach of a tidal wave, the sky is so much bluer. An unrolling of cyan like fractals of a baked marble. There is so little to remember. No grocery lists, no fresh turmeric, no shift of portabella mushrooms. No outstanding to-dos—no kibble to by, no resume to update. Harrison folds in blue and lets it gorge his eardrums. He gives his body to that wide chasm of water and breaststrokes not into a second life, but a third.

Here is the last bit:

He buzzes back into the apartment at 3:00AM, tracking in saltwater and SPF, puff-pastry gummed to his palm, a dog collar wound around his ring finger, a sheath of tulips shedding into the elevator behind him.

He hits every floor button twice and is undisturbed when the elevator lurches and reopens in sixty-second intervals. A man rotating a jade cuff on his wrist gets on at the fourth stop and gets off at the sixth. A woman wearing a lynx cape gets on at the eighth stop, breaks up with two girlfriends, and gets off at the eleventh. Two children in coveralls tail in after she leaves and throw jacks at each other’s eyes until one of them bleeds, and by then, they are on the fifteenth floor and the children are leaving like they have not left behind accidental shell casings. On the sixteenth floor, a deer head chihuahua patters in with no owner and barks at the door chime the moment it releases and lets him out. A mother and daughter shell pistachios on the twentieth, a maintenance man introduces himself as David though his nametag says Maxwell on the twenty-second, a flock of teenage girls in whirl about a new way to blend oil pastel on the twenty-third. So it is no wonder by the twenty-fifth floor, Harrison misses his stop and becomes one of these people too—the man with zinc down his eyes like a weeping statue, juggling pastry and a dog collar and a seedy bouquet of tulips.

He tracks seawater in that hallway, parts of him scattering with the zinc, the petals, the crumbs. Like a way to get back home even though he hasn’t started at his destination, he moves through the labyrinth of halls, both starving and nauseated. Tomorrow he will rise at dawn and taxi to Brooklyn and hammer four nails into two pieces of plywood and repeat. He will feed his dog. Learn how to cook something that will impress his mother, something French that he can’t pronounce like brasillé or oeufs cocotte. Find liberation in the constrict of routine or at least pretend to. It will be good for him, the rising, the taxis, the hammers, the nails, the dog food, the cooking—it will all be good.

By the time he gets to their door, his fingers are oiled and dripping with sunscreen. Rising, taxis, hammers, nails, dog food, cooking. He nearly drops the house keys. Rising, taxis, hammers, nails, dog food, cooking. Tomorrow will be his arrival. Rising, taxis, hammers, nails, dog food, cooking. His beginning swelling as he turns the lock. Rising, taxis, hammers, nails, dog food, cooking. There is no other way out.

The apartment is dark when he tracks in. The scent of cinnamon steeping the air like Suzanna’s pulled a saucepan of papas off the stove. At first he doesn’t hear it, but he should, the voices leafing the kitchen like a flit of moths. He steps out of his shoes but never sets anything down, even after he passes the coffee table. Two plates ringing the centre, streaked with and caldeirada and bayleaf. A pitcher of lemonade sweating onto the glass. It is almost like he never left, like he and his mother shared dinner, sipped from each other’s cups, cleaned the tines of each other’s fishbones. And he almost believes it. He never went to the farm. The kittens are where he left them, just a few feet away, not in Brooklyn. He doesn’t have a job to tend to. He never fixed the coffee machine. He didn’t go to the convenience store. He is not slathered in sunscreen, not holding a dog collar or pastries or a bouquet of tulips. He never dove into the ocean like it was some port to asylum and didn’t emerge soaked and walking half-dead to his apartment because he never left. This reality is so easy to believe, he is unfazed by the voices and how they get louder when he reaches the kitchen, when one says “Were you shopping for the apocalypse?” and the other one chokes on its drink and apologizes for its rudeness and stares at him in daydream, those eyes like forget-me-nots, gas fires, seafoam, the wing of a starling, his drop earring.

Harrison is grateful he is soaking wet when he enters that kitchen and Suzanna and Lonan sit at the table sharing a box of petit fours. At least he has an excuse when he drops everything.

That’s it for this update! The tea starts HERE!

--Rachel

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Blood Sister | Feeding Habits Update #5

Hey People of Earth!

Are we back for another Feeding Habits update? Today let’s chat chapter six!

Blood Sister is the first chapter in Harrison’s POV and also the longest chapter in the book (a little over 8k words). It took me about a month to write!

Scene A:

Harrison gets back to the NYC apartment he shares with his mother after running errands to ward off either the spirit that haunts their walls or to rescue whatever is stuck in them. His mother preps for a dinner as Harrison has invited his old pal Reeve over.

Scene B:

Harrison removes a litter of kittens from behind the drywall. One of the kittens is dead. Strangely, a German Shepherd puppy is also in the litter.

Scene C:

Reeve appears in a glamorous blur and makes an interesting first impression on Suz who seems slightly stunned and endeared by her.

Scene D:

At dinner Reeve confronts Harrison about his “straight-edge” lifestyle since moving to NYC and he realizes her judgements about his life being monotonous are very true--he lacks purpose.

Scene E:

Harrison and his mother clear the dishes and Suzanna confronts him on the fact that he hasn’t told her that Reeve is in fact Lonan’s sister. Suz knows the boys’ relationship is complicated, and plays Devil’s advocate by outright asking Reeve how her brother is. Reeve, who hasn’t seen Lonan longer than Harrison, has assumed Lonan lives with them or is close by, and feels semi-betrayed that Harrison has kept his whereabouts a secret.

Scene F:

Reeve and Harrison drive to a garden and he’s reminded of the event that lead to him and his mother’s return to the east coast.

Harrison meets Winona outside a convenience store, the same woman Lonan meets in ch.6 of Moth Work. She takes him to her mansion where she’s hosting a party and introduces him to her husband. Harrison makes multiple bad decisions which you can probably figure out for yourself!

Scene G:

Harrison wakes up in Winona’s house and is confused to see her and her husband standing over his leather jacket. If we remember what happened in ch. 6 of Moth Work, Lonan gets beat up by Winona’s husband and has Harrison’s jacket & angel chain stolen. We can assume from this scene that Winona has a) recognized the jacket and b) chosen him to come back to her house for the purpose of also beating him up (which happens).

Scene H:

Reeve and Harrison jump a fence into a garden to give the dead kitten an unorthodox “water burial” in the garden’s fountain. Reeve confronts him on why no one has seemed to care about her whereabouts for the last year, and also suggests the only reason he wanted to see her now is because he misses Lonan. Harrison miserably drinks too much wine.

Scene I:

Harrison wakes up in the cold, very drunk, and Reeve is gone. A security guard looms over him. Harrison asks the confused man if he thinks he was separated at birth. Harrison isn’t referring to feeling like he’s been removed from a sibling bond, like the kittens, but a deeper, “indissoluble bond” formed between two people (like the kittens and the puppy). This connects to the title “Blood Sister” as Reeve suggests she and Suzanna may be connected in this way, to the kittens, and to Lonan and Harrison.

This idea of “indissoluble bonds” was reinforced when I listened to Stephanie Harlowe’s coverage on the Parker-Hulme case, and this was the title of her video! This idea of an immutable connection between two people who are forever separated, like the dead kitten despite its death, still being connected to its siblings, was very relevant to how Harrison feels about Lonan.

Excerpts:

Here’s the entire first scene <3

Something has died in the drywall. Suz insists there must also be a ghost—she hears cries when she sleeps—so when Harrison returns to their apartment with both a handsaw and a bottle of holy water, she’s more than pleased.

Today, it snows in New York City, and no amount of brushing off his hair and jacket rids him of the snowflakes he tracks in. His face stings with the bitter early March air, and he’s resettled easily into the east coast grit; he likes the taste of instant coffee and the smell of gasoline.

Harrison shoulders off his jacket, the leather rigid with frost, and undoes the loop of his scarf one-handed. The apartment smells overwhelmingly of cloves and apple peel, and he is unsurprised when his mother rushes over to him, flushed from the kitchen heat, her #1 Dad apron bunching at her hips, and pushes a highball glass into his palm in exchange for his findings.

“It’s a secret recipe,” she says, twiddling through his errands. Suzanna lifts the bottle of holy water to eye level, unscrews its cap, and daps two soaked fingers to her lips just as he dips his fingers into the glass, around its rim, and then into his mouth. The hot mull of liquid bursts against his taste buds, citrusy. “Wish I believed in this shit as much as I believe nutmeg is my new holy saviour.”

Harrison downs the rest of the glass’s contents, the cider’s spice grafting down his throat. Its heat clings to the roof of his mouth, a subtle burn that numbs his tongue, but he likes it, its sweetened acid like a rucking back to life.

“Is that the secret?” He runs his pinky along the base of the glass so the last drops of liquid climb up his fingernail.

“The Lord?”

Harrison laughs and accepts the holy water she hands him, rescrews its cap in place. “Nutmeg.”

Suzanna takes his empty glass and whisks toward the kitchen. On the stove burbles two saucepans and one Dutch oven, the fan whirring like the pleats of an accordion.

“Maybe it’s both,” she says.

You asked for the entire second scene? Here Harrison finds the litter of kittens:

The first thing Harrison removes when he saws through the drywall lining the two-prong outlet is a dead kitten. Its body shifts onto his hand with damp weight, like an overripe pear, its silver hair glass-like under the beam of his flashlight. Though it sits comfortably in the pit of his palm, though he knows he cannot kill or revive it, his first instinct is to lay it on the beach towel Suzanna laid out because he fears he’ll crush it with just one pulse of his thumb.

Its eyes are the size of his pinkie nail, gently shuttered like it’s drifted to a lawless sleep. The animal will remain in this state—only death, but as he looks at it, braying its hairs back with his forefinger, he considers alternative options. Harrison knows little of necromancy, but considers anointing it with the holy water, lighting a red-cased candle in front of it, chanting a verse from Revelations.

With the flashlight secured between his molars, Harrison pulls out four more kittens, all that mew as they cling to his fingers, their noses twitching against his skin like it’s feed. They burrow into the beach towel, trampling over one another with blind fervency, all shimmery silver. In comparison to their deceased sibling, they wriggle, pink-nosed, and don’t settle against the grain of the towel, always wagging, like earthworms.

Harrison believes he’s done—removed the dead animal and rescued four more. Good work which he’ll take to a farm just outside the city—Suzanna has a friend. He’s nearly clicked off the flashlight when he sees it, just a subtle glint of something else—an animal that isn’t silver, but a dry brown.

At first, he thinks it’s a rat that’s raked through the walls to where it is now, but the longer he shines the flashlight, the more he sees it is not a rat, or even a kitten. What sits, jittering behind the outlet, is a pup.

Like the kittens, its nose twitches back and forth, its eyes small enough to be the ovular black beads on Suzanna’s rosary which hangs, decorative, above the front entrance. “It’s a cleanse for the spirit,” Suz said when he questioned her reasoning for bringing religious memorabilia into a house of two atheists. “Dianne from church told me.” Dianne is a beer-bellied schoolteacher, proud pothead and mother of four who frequently volunteers at the church’s weekend functions with his mother. “She’s into that kind of thing. Seances. Jesus Christ. I think she mentioned they had something spicy going on in college.”

“Something spicy?”

“Spicy. Like hot wings. Habaneros. One-night stands. I don’t know Harry, it sounded illicit.”

They both grinned.

Harrison does not know when him and Suz began getting along. There was no one date or time, no anniversary to look forward to for their official reunion. One moment he struggled not comparing her face to the one he knew in his early teens, and the next, they crouched over a salad bowl of burnt popcorn, taking turns painting each other’s fingernails with the same shade of red nail polish—Crazy for Carmine

The dog can’t yet focus its eyes on anything, but Harrison swears it stares at him. It fidgets from its position crouched on the outlet, so when he extends his hand, an offering, he’s surprised when it crouches onto the tip of his finger, shimmying into his palm. It’s even smaller when he holds it, plum-sized, and velveteen. Its eyelids flicker like the apartment’s bad TV signal, and when it opens its mouth to cry, its teeth, no larger than the tip of a toothpick, prick up.

“You’re not a tabby,” he says, drags his fingers through the suede-like gloss of its fur. The pup curls against his knuckles, murmurs languidly until Harrison pets its head again.

“Did you say something, Harry?”           

Harrison stands from his crouch when his mother materializes from her bedroom, the animal still pared delicately in his palm. When he glances at her, he’s surprised to see she’s changed out of her usual loungewear, a tank top and bell-bottoms, and into a patterned shirtdress that sways to her knees. The Matisse-like design, organic shapes, all the colour of a celery stalk, drapes to her knees, flounces when she twirls for him.           

“I thought we agreed on business casual,” he says, but smiles wider the longer he looks at her. Tulle gathers in a funnel down her waist, pluming her so she looks less like his mother and more like a fairy.          

“I’m taking the business side, and you’ll take the casual.”          

“She’s just a friend, Mom. She’s not expecting anything.”           

“She’s got an English last name,” Suz says. Her eyelids glitter with gold pigment, her lips tacky with rouge. “Of course she’s classy.”           

Harrison thumbs the back of the pup’s head and shifts closer to Suzanna when she cocks her head toward it.

“I think Reeve is more than classy,” he says. “Maybe stylish. Exclusive. Superior. Glamorous.”           

Suzanna shifts the pup from Harrison’s hands to her own, neatly patting its head with her pinkie until its murmurs soften. When she holds the animal, it’s like he no longer stands behind her. It’s just her in her Matisse dress and the dog, comfortably blinking in her hand. “You found a puppy in a litter of kittens?” she says, less of a question, and more of a declaration of wonderment. She lifts the animal to eye level. Its nose wrinkles, like the skin of a fig. “Looks like mama picked up a stray. A beautiful stray. You’re absolutely beautiful.”

Reeve making only iconic appearances:

Reeve appears in their doorway wearing cat-eye sunglasses, a bottle of pinot noir slatted between her arm and chest. Though it’s been storming since early morning and there has been no sun in the city since the week previous, her appearance is so believable—cheekbones subtly tanned like she’s mastered the timing for a perfect sunlike glow, the sunglasses teetering neatly on the tip of her nose and staying there, like they’re a dog she’s taught to sit and stay—that Harrison’s almost convinced she commissions the sun to come out twice daily for a private show, just for her.

“We booked an appointment,” she says, letting herself into the apartment in a faux-fur blur.

Harrison swivels as she unzips, tooth by tooth, the red skin-slick vinyl of her gogo boots. Her hair falls in an untamed fringe around her forehead, the front sections pinned back by an array of rainbow-coloured butterfly clips. It mimics the fray of her jacket, fluffed around the hood’s perimeter.

Reeve dusts snow off her corduroy culottes, readjusts the collar of her black turtleneck. “When I moved to the city, I forgot how gruelling the winters can become.” She taps the heels of her boots onto the welcome mat so slush flakes onto the rubber before slipping her feet out elegantly, like Cinderella. “I almost believed New York City existed in a fictional bubble where everything remained dry and hot, like in Egypt, or the Mojave. When I asked for a hellish climate, I was hoping for sun and the occasional forest fire. Not ice and more ice.”

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” Suz speaks where Harrison’s words shrivel. She steps from the kitchen to the entrance, her dress flouncing when she extends a hand toward Reeve. “William Shakespeare.”

Reeve looks up. The cold has pinched her cheeks pink, drooled water to her eyes so when she blinks, tears sprout to her jawline. “Suzanna,” Reeve says, and embraces his mother with willful ease, like they’ve been girlfriends for a decade, like they purchase pavlova from the same patisserie at the same time on Thursdays, like they help each other whip perfectly fatty meringues at the same baking class so they can master the same pavlova and never buy it again. “I’ve heard nothing about you and yet I feel we’ve known each other for years. What do they call that? Blood sisters.”

So here’s the whole third scene lol:

At dinner, Reeve pops the cork of a bottle of pinot noir with her teeth before Suz tells her she and Harrison don’t drink. She’s in the middle of saying she’s a prophet, the bringer of wine, her lips parted around the cork, traces of her lip gloss gumming around its circumference.

“No alcohol?” Reeve says, spitting the cork into her palm so a glob of red transfers onto her skin.

Suz stirs a serving dish of clams with an olive wood spoon, their shells phosphorescent in the artificial light. “Harry and I have taken a break from spirits. Except for the holiest one of course.” She points to the roof as if signaling to the man upstairs and dishes a spoonful of clams onto Reeve’s plates, the shells chiming against the ceramic.

“That’s so reverent.” Reeve pricks the edge of a clam with a toothpick and swallows its frill into her mouth. “So virginal.”

Harrison accepts a spoonful of clams from his mother and adjusts a sprig of rosemary so it lies perpendicular to the plate’s edge. Olive oil gums under his fingernails and soaks into the fibres of a slice of bread he rips at the crust.

“I always assumed you’d be a partier if you ever moved back to the city,” Reeve says, and it takes Harrison a moment to realize she’s speaking to him. “Disco. Karaoke. Cocktails. Men who buy you cocktails.”

“Has that been your life in New York, Reeve?” Harrison sucks a lobe of clam between his lips. Its brine coats his tongue in a burst of salt and cilantro.

Reeve tips the bottle of wine to her mouth, its red gift bow shifting, silverish with light. “You could say that. I just expected more. Not that your life now is boring. But I assumed there would be more glamour.”

Harrison sops up a dribble of oil onto a shear of bread, and says something like, “I thought so too,” before swallowing.

“We have glamour,” Suz says as Harrison absently eats more clams. She points to the chandelier the two found at the bottom of a New Jersey dumpster, yet to be installed, sitting in its crystal glory on the floor. She explains the story of how it came to be as Harrison eats and listens for the mewing of the kittens, thinks about their one dead sibling that now lies curled inside a shoebox, separated in eternal rest.

Reeve is not wrong. Life in New York City has been far from glamorous. He shares this apartment with his mother who pays for all of the rent—it’s been months since Harrison could hold down a steady job. He tries with odds and ends—repairing a neighbour’s bathroom sink, tacking sconces up outside the apartment for a hundred bucks. His room is a décor-less box that smells like wallpaper even though it’s sanded smooth and painted with two coats of an eggshell-finished oatmeal white. There is no dancing, no music, no colour, no partying, no alcohol or men with alcohol. Not anymore, at least. Her statement should not sting—this is the utter truth. The apartment is repetitive shades of indistinctive creams, furniture he and his mother pick up off the curbs of wealthy homeowners, incomplete, yet his home, nonetheless. No matter the story Suz tries to spin—look at the exposed brick, look at the counter space, look at the custom-moulded baseboards the previous renters installed—he knows what Reeve has said is true. Life in the city is comfortable but monotonous—an unrelenting kind of normal.

“We found kittens,” Harrison says, promptly interrupting the women’s conversation that has quickly moved away from the apartment to their favourite places to eat gelato. Suz’s clam drifts off her toothpick; Reeve almost chokes on a gulp of wine. Harrison swipes a chunk of bread through olive oil and chews. “That’s glamorous.”

Reeve sets the wine bottle back onto the dinner table and folds her hands over the other. Her manicure is chipped, just the remnants of a tortoiseshell marble. “What kind? Calico?”

“They’re just kittens. And a dog.”

“You found a dog in a litter of kittens?”

Harrison eats one last clam and finishes his portion of bread. “Glamorous,” he says, his mouth half-full.

The beginning of scene 4:

While Suz and Reeve discuss room décor and clear the plates, Harrison checks on the kittens. Dishes clank rhythmically as they’re soaped, rinsed, dried, the ceramic whimpering in time with the kittens. He hasn’t named any but understands their differences. Though the quadruplets share the same silver coat, one has a slightly larger nose than the rest, one has a fleck of gold in its blue eye, one has pinstripes scrolled across its forehead like a branch of lightning—small details like this differentiate them.

In his palm, the one with the golden eye crawls, its underbelly sateen. Tomorrow, he’ll make the drive just outside Brooklyn where he’ll drop the kittens off at an old farmhouse. Suz’s friend from rehab is selling it, some Theodore Harvey, but his wife fosters animals, and was delighted to have the new additions. Though he hasn’t spoken to his mother about this arrangement, he also knows tomorrow he will keep the dog. Juniper, he’s named her—June with the eyes like a solstice.

When his mother pokes him, he jumps, and the kitten shimmies off his palm.

The sounds of dishes clinking morphs into the filmy mutter of a talkshow Reeve watches, sipping absently at her gifted bottle of red wine.

She nudges a pastry into his hand, where the kitten once sat, the skin of the pasteis de nata oiling his hand. He crunches into it as she watches patiently, as if waiting for a review, and its caramel flavour ruminates on his tongue.

“This is good,” he says around a mouthful of pastry.

“$4.99.” Suz smiles and takes a nibble herself. “For six.”

Together they stand over the kittens, passing the tart back and forth until Harrison gives the final piece to his mother. The apartment whirs with the calculated singe of automated laughter and the purr of the kittens. He knows one sits dead in a shoebox on his bedroom dresser. The ground too hard to dig, a burial still necessary.

Suz licks a crumb from her thumb and wipes her palms along the skirt of her dress. Their focus shifts to Reeve who lies sprawled against the two-seater, yelling something at a contestant on the show who’s gotten an answer wrong—tulip, not two lips. That’s fabulous. You are fabulously a failure.

“You didn’t tell me she was Lonan’s sister.”

Harrison pokes at a flake of pastry and wipes his hands on the front of his jeans. Reeve’s bangles clatter in a cyan jangle as she applauds at the same contestant she previously ridiculed. There are so many things he could say to his mother—he knew Reeve first, Reeve isn’t just Lonan’s sister to him, more like his own, but when he adjusts himself, swallowing and tidying the hem of his shirt, all that comes out is, “I didn’t think you needed to know.”

“I would’ve like to,” Suz says. “Does she know? That you don’t know where he is?”

Harrison’s fingernail catches on a loose thread, and he yanks it out so even Reeve glances back at its upholstered plink. “I know where he is, Suzanna.”

Reeve and Suz being icons (direct continuation from the above):

Harrison turns back to the kittens who plow over one another like ants. Heat flushes his throat, prickles his cheeks and ears and suctions like a vacuum. Though Suzanna eventually leaves, joining Reeve on the couch, propping her feet on the same coffee table so their polished feet touch, toes pink like raw cherry tomatoes, though he knows they’re both right in knowing and not knowing where Lonan is, though he knows it should no longer matter to him, he finds himself leaning against the table where the kittens encase each other in a plastic shoe bin, ticking his fingers at his side.

He does not know what the reality television show is about. From the blots he hears from the TV’s can-like speaker, he concludes it’s something about botany, love, vengeance, fertilizer. No one theme—it does not even know what it is itself. Suz has materialized with another tart, and she and Reeve nibble at it with fervency, so close, their tongues almost touch as they dart across the custard. The sight is almost viper-like, their teeth notched forward, and it should be venomous, or at its worst—friendly, but all Harrison sees is girlish, maternal intimacy.

Suz and Reeve laugh at a contestant who wears a tartan printed jumpsuit and mismatching earrings—one the shape of a pineapple, the other an urn-like bead she claims holds the ashes of her great aunt. They outline her figure with their pinkies. They clutch each other’s hands. They flush like beets and wipe crumbs from each other’s mouths.

Reeve’s momentary lapse into delicacy:

Harrison turns his back and pretends to tend to the kittens. They all know he does nothing but thumb the backs of their heads, let them suckle against his fingertips—they all know, and yet, he continues doing it. Silence cuts through the apartment like hot glass.

If Reeve and Suzanna still touch toes, it’s because neither want to loosen the other’s pride. The only sound in the room belongs to the television which has moved away from dishwashing to a watering hose—four for four, as if this is a discount, as if anyone will truly need that many watering hoses.

“I haven’t seen your brother since late August,” Harrison says once the commercials simmer back to the gaudy laughter of the reality television show. At first, he doesn’t look at Reeve. He knows what he’ll see—some form of betrayal. She didn’t come here looking for Lonan. She hasn’t even asked for him, but he knows what he’ll see when he looks at her. Best friends do not keep secrets.

When he concedes, he is right. Reeve looks at him from under a thick smear of kohl, her eyes focused, like slate beads. Her lips are pink from wine and she unhinges a fleck of opal nail polish from her thumb. Her mouth does not move, a straight line that cranks with her jaw.

“Where is he?” she asks, fluttering her lashes when Suz pats her arm. If Harrison is right, Reeve hasn’t see her brother since she peered in on him when the two shared the tent, pearled a few smoke rings from Harrison’s cigar, and left for the east coast. Before he left, Foster filled him in on the details of her eventual cross-country desertion, though there weren’t many. How he’d last seen her at the motel, a margarita wobbling in her palm, what she’d said to him, to stay special, that there weren’t many people like him left, and how she had vanished like vapour by the time they realized to check. While Reeve hiked across the country by herself, he and Lonan swam through nighttide and badly waltzed in a four-by-four bathroom. She made an anonymous life in New York City, hailing cabs with just her eyes, and learning the easiest ways to shoplift. Alone. Her last memory of Lonan one where he pretended to sleep so he didn’t have to say goodbye to her.

“Las Vegas the last time I saw him,” Harrison says. He feels the urge to apologize for something, to hug her, or cry. Though her expression unbends from severe back to her perfected mould of glitzy conviction, her momentary lapse into delicacy startles him. He looks back to the kittens who seem more interested in themselves than him.

Reeve tightens her grip around the neck of the wine bottle and tactfully sips, her pinkie erect, her lips pursed just the right amount. “What happened?” she asks and sets the bottle onto the coffee table. She lets a dribble of wine fall from her mouth so she can dab at it like a wounded animal.

Harrison and Reeve in the car:

Harrison brings the box with the dead kitten and Reeve brings the bottle of pinot noir. Together, they settle in her red Beetle convertible, a car she insists she pawned for a quarter its listing price, though he figures from the way she settles in it, carefully placing the wine bottle in the cup holder, wiping her hands on her thighs as if checking for grease, that it must belong to a roommate or boyfriend, if she has either. The car smells faintly of pineapple and vanilla, a scent not unfamiliar to him, the waft strengthening as the tree-shaped air-freshener swings closer to him with every turn.

Reeve asks vaguely of his time in the city, how life has been for him and his mother since they moved from Vegas in mid October. Her mouth flutters with speech, each word like the hull of a hard candy she specially tastes before sharing. Has it been marvellous, just as you thought? Don’t you ever wonder how a city could become so brilliant? Isn’t the weather maddening? Don’t you adore it? She asks about Foster, what living with him was like, what saying goodbye to him the week previous was like—was it tragic—and he could tell her his move in with him and his mother wasn’t much of a plan—not a last resort either, but a salvaging. A necessary resuscitation. Reeve’s lips as dubious as shadow puppets.

Here’s some of the flashback with Winona at the convenience store:

The woman stood under the hex of the convenience store’s light, spooling her in a feverish blue. The sun had been down for hours, but its residual heat clung to Harrison’s arms in tacky gusts that wound up his fingers. Like the woman, he reached for his cigarettes. Vehicles spun across the highway just beyond the gas station, and when he raised his head after lighting the cigarette, the woman was staring at him.

“Aren’t you too young to be out without a parent or guardian?” she asked. Her hair was the colour of his mother’s candlesticks, a waxy boxed red. Her rings waggled in the false light.

“Maybe,” he said, a curl of smoke looping out of his mouth. “Can’t remember which life I’m on. There are so many. I could be ninety-seven. Tomorrow might be my birthday.”

It was September in Las Vegas. White licks of car exhaust laced the black sky, and though it wasn’t cold, Harrison pulled his jacket tighter around his chest.

Winona tries to figure out whether or not Harrison is a local by getting to know his eyes/face lol:

Harrison dropped the butt of his cigarette and stomped out its embers. When it was fully out, he fit his hands into his jacket pocket and approached the woman. Up close, her trench coat was pebbled with lint, a bead from her charm bracelet missing. She crushed her cigarette too, and when her hands were free, she stepped toward him with both palms out, and pressed them to his cheeks so he felt both the heat of her skin and the watery bite of her jewelry. She examined each plane of his face as if they were sides of a prism. Her perfume, a vinegary sort of citrus, stung his eyes the closer she got, the fur of her jacket’s trim brushing his chin when she pressed to her toes for a better look.

“You could be so many things,” she said, tilting his jaw at the same moment her pinkie slid from the jab of his nose bridge to his top lip. She pushed her face closer to his and inhaled, her plastic nail marking his skin with a pixel of glitter. “You’ve got the face of an angel. Which means you’re good. You’re sacred. You’re discreet.” When her finger poked into his mouth, her knuckle snagged on his canines. “Could also mean you’re a fraud. A criminal. You know, Lucifer wasn’t always the fallen angel.”

A bit of the party:

Winona’s front lawn was manicured, cropped neat at its soil scalp. Clusters of people huddled in different places—four gargling in the stone fountain just before the iron gate, two drinking from three martini glasses at once, a group of on their backs, arms wound like a wicker basket, shot glasses teetering between their teeth like human serving tables.

Winona parked opposite the house that pulsed with light. Harrison got out when she did, and with ease, she punched into the gate, leading him past her perfect lawn, her party guests, as if they were simply garden statues.

Inside, more people concentrated, all stopping Winona for a moment to say hello as she passed. She moved in a way only the owner of a house would, her strides easy, like she knew exactly where to take him and when.

“I know it’s busy,” Winona said, adjusting her volume for the holler of party guests. “I promise it’s always like that. Who is it that says we need partners for life? God or my therapist? This is that but every week. You meet so many people.”

Harrison listened to her haphazardly. Though he’d been in Las Vegas for a month, he hadn’t been out except for a few errands at the grocery store or for cigarettes, despite his mother’s insistence he quit. The party was overwhelming. Bass from the stereo caught him by the throat and held him there as he and Winona threaded through her house that seemed closer to a mansion. The interior smelled like cleaning bleach and fruit cocktails, and he could hardly walk without someone rearing into him. He should’ve left, known better, done better, but it thrilled him, every moment of the party’s chokehold.

When Winona pushed through her French doors and out to the back pool, Harrison tailed her closely, unsure he’d be able to keep pace if he lost sight of her, even for a moment. The backyard smelled artificially floral, like orchids, tuberose, the grassy melt of citronella candles.

Some of my fave Harrison dialogue:

“You should’ve told me you were into vintage. Cheap but chic. I like it, angel.” Her ring finger smushed into his jaw, and then against his hairline.

“What’s vintage about me?”

Winona laughed, though her eyes remained glass-like. “Your jacket, of course. You’re thrifty. Into second-hand.”

~~theme makes an appearance:

It was only later, when he stumbled, bloody knuckled, through their front door, stepping over partygoers and martini glasses, that he understood. He hadn’t come to the party thinking about Lonan but managed to attract the same people. He hadn’t drunk the magenta liquid thinking about him but managed to exit the house stumbling, as he did, his knees knotted like a newborn lamb. There was something inconceivably indissoluble about them—their bond mirror-like, one making one decision, and the other mimicking it with vigour, unknowingly inseparable.

God tier denial:

“What do you miss about him?”

Harrison blinks. He hasn’t expected her to speak to him again, in fact he’s pictured the night whittling into gauzy silence, them setting the box afloat in the fountain, and then leaving once more, wordless. Reeve drinks another sip of wine. Its scent stings, like earthy cranberries.

“I don’t,” he says, which is a lie, and they both know it. Harrison has never been a good liar, but especially a bad liar around Reeve who’s always managed to snuff out the truth. She looks at him in absolutes, like she sees his every answer scraped into his cheek and doesn’t need to check his work. Her eyes are feline and rimmed with kohl and aquamarine mica—she doesn’t need anyone to tell her the truth because she holds it in her fist. “He has a girlfriend. He’s happy.” Harrison rations more wine down his tongue, three times as much as he’s intended to drink.

“But what do you miss about him?”

Harrison misses nothing. He sleeps little and smokes too much because he misses nothing. He walks by himself, eats by himself, talks to himself because he misses nothing. He jumps from job to job, person to person, place to place because he misses nothing. He wakes up in dazes the colour of blackberries because he misses nothing. He blinks dreams from his eyelashes like they’re bad spells because he misses nothing. He holds himself, he drinks himself, he leaves no company for anyone because he misses nothing about Lonan. He misses absolutely nothing.

Harrison sits up and lifts the dead kitten’s box. He feels Reeve’s gaze when he lowers it into the fountain, the box giving into the slosh of water, and feels her gaze once more when he sits back and drinks more wine. The moon makes him miserable, its silver gloat like a reminder, of how easy it would be to look at it and see Lonan’s face appear in its dime. He doesn’t register how much he drinks, just that it feels better than not drinking. He doesn’t register that Reeve never takes the bottle, that it’s just him and its open gape of wine. As the kitten swirls around the fountain, he tries not to think of its siblings back at the apartment, all mottled over each other like burrs. An unbreakable bond, and what that means, even as one of them sits alone, gurgling along the current of a fountain.

If you didn’t ask for angst before, you sure did now:

He does not remember falling asleep, and so waking up feels illusory, shimmery, like a mirage. He focuses on dart of yellow light and a man wearing a security uniform telling him he can’t be here, here being the garden, past the fence, under the fountain. Snowflakes have clumped against his eyelashes and he blinks twice to dislodge them. The man must ask him if he’s intoxicated, never noticing the shoebox floating in the fountain, because Harrison says, “Who’s to say? I miss so many things,” and isn’t talking about the bottle of wine or Reeve that both seem to have vanished, as if they were never there. Harrison blinks again, searching for Reeve’s outline somewhere in the crisp bushel of dead foliage, but she never reappears—has he imagined the entire thing, or is she magical, effervescent, invisible? What was the last thing she said? Drink it all. It’s good for you. It’s like your own personal healing tonic.

“Do you think it’s possible I was separated at birth?” Harrison asks the security guard, who leads him by the elbow out past the iron gate and into the parking lot where he stumbles over a patch of glazy slush and onto his knees.

“Are you a twin?”

Harrison draws his index finger through the slush, doodling nonsense—letters of his name, an eyeball, a singular, faceless nose. “I can’t stop thinking about him.”

“Your twin?”

Harrison shakes his head.

Snow and slush dredge his jeans and the hem of his jacket; a streetlamp filters him and the security guard in foamy yellow. His skin has numbed from sitting out in the cold too long, and in some places, prickles with heat, like the fritz of pine needles. Reeve has dissolved in the fresh spatter of snow that settles on the pavement, his fingers. The fur fringe of her hood gone, the slick of her boots. She will not be here tomorrow. He may never see her again, and yet this is not what makes him ache in the way he does.

His hands move for him. Dividing the snow in slopes, curves, lines—letters. When he’s finished, he rests his chin on his own shoulder and dries the slop of slush from his nail. The security guard leans over, bends down to get a better look, but Harrison doesn’t have to look to know what he’s written. Chiselled so the flurries fill its gaps, like cement. His name will be erased by dawn. Lonan.

So that’s it for this very, very long update! See you for chapter seven!

--Rachel

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

👀

send me a 👀 and i’ll post a snippet of art/writing that i never got around to finishing this year (r.i.p)

okay so here’s the tea on all the things that didn’t get finished in 2019!

2019 was the year of abandoning short stories lol oops! Here’s the hit list: :’(

1. Growing Season

This is such a hard hit because who doesn’t want to read a story about a woman replacing her boyfriend with a cactus, narrated BY the cactus?? I’d love to revisit this story because a) it’s told in my fave POV (first person directed to “you”) and b) “you” is an apathetic college dropout who goes for the hard dRAG after a bad breakup with her boyfriend, and c) because a cactus NARRATES it.

I’m at a little over 800 words in this story (it def gives me Sea Life by Eliza Robertson vibes).

2. Phantom Limbs in D Minor

Biggest hit! I’ve been working on this story since March, made good progress in the beginning, and slowly began drifting from it. I’ve chipped away at it sporadically over the last few months, and I’ve made it my goal to finish it over break! I don’t see myself hitting this goal, but I do hope to actually finish this story because I feel like it contains some of the best prose I’ve written and I love the vibe! I’m at over 2k words with a scene of about 1k floating around. I’ve actually toyed with making this story a novel because the scope seems quite large, but I definitely want to finish the short story before I think about that more! We follow chaotic Linda as she stress renovates her childhood home (a past! commune!) after her mother’s death. Linda is so precious to me, and I’d love to give her a story! If New York by Ex:Re was a person, it would be Linda lol. 

3. Anatomy of a Swinging Door

I’m making a statement, and my statement is that this is my designated cult story which means it must happen in the future. This was originally my “test out first person retrospective” story, though I think the point of view isn’t working super well here, but we’ll see! I conveniently wrote a logline for this story when I was trying to narrow down the scope, so here you go: A young woman visits her childhood home on the one-year anniversary of her brother’s disappearance and meets the new (and strange) family who lives there. 

(cult!)

So the second round of tragedies goes toward novels, AKA Houses With Teeth (which I can share excerpts from!). 

4. Houses With Teeth

I really struggled with this book this year, because it came to be in a time where my writing was getting an overhaul (though I didn’t realize it at the time)! I’ve learned a lot about intention in writing over the last year, something the Fostered series has lacked (oops). This led to me being very unsure about where I wanted to go with this book in particular--the same route as all the others (weird contemporary with dystopian elements that haven’t fully gone away yet) orrrr plan out something a bit more literary! I’ve fought with myself over this since April, and still don’t know where I’m going, but I’m missing my chaotic diva narrator Reeve and would love to get back into her head! 

This book has gone through about 3 openings, and I haven’t fully landed on any yet. I’m rethinking how I want to start this book, but taking my time with Moth Work to work me up to the timeline in HWT (which takes place about 8 months after the end of Rewired). I think I’ve shared most of this!

Some excerpts of first person retrospective Reeve (AKA Rachel trying to be Emma Cline looool):

Though the church was only a fifteen minute walk from the apartment, I packed a picnic basket of cha siu bao and a bottle of red wine and wore heels so they would know I wasn’t Christian. The basket wasn’t mine and neither were the bao—these were both things I’d taken from Liu. This wasn’t the first time I’d stolen from her. I’d once taken her fifty-dollar jar of saffron from the pantry because I’d heard it was the most expensive spice and wanted to feel rich. I took her jade Buddha necklace because she’d left it in the back and I wanted to feel cultured in her city, I wanted to become her history. The saffron jar was replaced. She didn’t comment when I wore the necklace at my next shift. This was why Liu and I worked well together. She pitied me so would never fire me, even when I skipped shifts and cussed at the customers. I felt entitled to her things because she was kind to me. I felt entitled to her kindness. 

lol I haven’t read this in months and it made me laugh #valid:

I crossed the street before the streetlight changed because this is how I lived in New York City. The world was unfair and lightless and I was an atheist who believed in God, walking in five inch heels on a busted road in the ghetto so I could get enough holy water to drown the ghost out of my apartment. 

When all else fails, add a dash of mother:

The air that summer was always the same: dense and wet, even on the good days. It clung to my arms and threatened to erode the skin there, even when it wasn’t sunny. I remembered my mother’s insistence of sunscreen when I was a child; before the pool, in the pool, out of the pool, when we weren’t even at the pool. Her hands were always cold and the sunscreen was always liquid—Izzy was never good at temperature or putting things in the right places. She’d put the instant coffee in the fridge and the cream on the counter. She’d cook the eggs too long and the ice too little. My father would criticize her as a joke and she’d threaten a divorce. This was the only thing I knew was true about my mother. Sunscreen was expensive, so I never bought it. 

Reeve bringing out the drag:

“Grab me a pack of cigarettes?” I shifted the picnic basket so it rested in the crook of my elbow.

“ID?”

“You don’t need my ID.”

“I ID every customer. You’re nothing special, baby.”

The man’s mustache wilted in the tungsten light of the variety store, spindly like loose threads. My father had grown a mustache like that once, and it took only two nights before my mother cut it off in his sleep. Izzy was brash like that, and I wanted that too; to find a pair of scissors in one of the aisles and chip at that flaccid mustache. There was nothing special about this man, either. All men in New York City tried to look like that; facial hair like coiled up leeches, a gut they pretended wasn’t a gut, but the fault of an unflattering polo from their wives. I imagined the snip of the kitchen scissors on my father’s upper lip, the same snip I heard the next day when he clipped the evergreens lining the walkup. There was something coarse about how similar it all was—pruning trees, grooming facial hair. I had turned twenty that spring—it would’ve taken only a minute for him to pass me a pack, but this was too easy. I wasn’t biological in New York City; I shouldn’t have been. 

5. Fostered But It’s Magic

So this was never meant to be a full project, though I had hoped to write a bit of it just for fun and never got around to it! FBIM (obvi working title lol) is exactly what it sounds like: the Fostered series but with a magical twist! I don’t write very much genre fiction, nor have I ever written fantasy, but a few months ago, felt drawn to the idea of putting Fostered in a magical world (my comp titles are SHREK 4 meets HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE). 

I don’t have any of this written, but I do have a few notes which I can share! 

I didn’t realize I’d made a tag yourself writing these notes but (I’m Lonan):

Reeve is a magical con artist who runs her own business selling bootleg magic. 

Lonan is absent and part bird

Harrison *believes* he is #magic free but has been recently getting hot flashes during nightmares.

Foster has an in-home herbalism business where he helps mostly the elderly and children. He has a cart that he wheels monthly into town. Kind of a failing business.

The gist is that Harrison (who we’d be following) can’t sleep due to hot flashes and nightmares of his ex (@ Lonan) and is referred to a small business run by a clairvoyant who promises to make all psychological problems disappear—relationship issues, sleep issues, life issues. This clairvoyant is actually Reeve who is telikinetic of some sorts, and doesn’t actually provide magic, but manipulates (usually weak) brains, AKA tricks people into paying her large sums of money when she gives them no magical help in return. We ALSO have a “past” plotline, and this is the very loose logline I’d written down (tho if I ever write any of this, is subject to change):

After being tormented by nightmares of his ex lover resulting in violent hot flashes and an inability to keep up employment, Harrison seeks a magical intervention. When the clairvoyant he hopes will cure his strange ailment turns out to be a con woman—and his old friend—he is thrown back into the past and forced to rekindle relationships he thought he’d left behind.  

Some dialogue I wrote down ft. clairvoyant Reeve being Reeve:

H: Why are you doing this? 

R (reapplying lip colour): Is my lipstick distracting you? The colour is dazzling.

H: It’s bullshit. 

R (abruptly stops drawing on lip colour): The lipstick? 

H: Your work.

My fave interaction tho has to be this bit I’d noted down with pure Foster comforting Harrison after a nightmare:

Foster *reading on couch when Harrison wakes up in #panique*: What happened? Harrison? Do you need some eucalyptus? 

*do u need some eucalyptus*

That’s basically all the writing related things I didn’t finish in 2019! I’d love to explore them all in 2020 though! Thanks for asking. :)

--Rachel

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Houses With Teeth | Writing Update

Hey People of Earth!

What is this shiny new title--is she a short story, is she a... a new novel?? Or is she the seventh book of FOSTERED because apparently that series never ends!! Haha.

Ha.

So yes! This is the first update for--yes!--book 7 of FOSTERED! A few things you’ve probably already noticed:

The title is not a past tense verb and we STAN. If you haven’t noticed books 1-6 of the series follow a verb-ED structure, and I honestly became so over it by book four but kept up with it for consistency’s sake. I debated for probably two seconds before I settled that I am TIRED of these UGLY fostered titles, so we have made a CHANGE. Honestly, I kind of needed this change because this book is going to be kind of... different from the others (genre, tone, etc, etc), and I needed a more concrete separation from Old Fostered to New Fostered.

Originally, this title actually belonged to REWIRED for about 2 hours before I decided to give it to the new book. This was my thought process:

Me want new title for REWIRED, this title = trash

*comes up with new title*

nvm i’ll never be able to think of a title better than this for book 7

(I’d like to say my process was more thoughtful than this but this is literally how it happened oops)

While trying to come up with titles for the three sections of Rewired, I came up with houses for part 2. This is what sparked me to think of the title HOUSES WITH TEETH. I changed part two’s name because houses literally made no sense in conjunction with the chapters, and I’m happy about it since I looove this title. 

So without further ado, let’s get into it!

I honestly have been struggling with the idea of this book for a very long time. As I’ve mentioned, FOSTERED’s 5 year anniversary will be coming up this October--AKA I’ve been writing this series for a very long time! I grew up with this series and its characters and whilst it’s all been very special to me in my development as an adolescent, I’m also older now, and my tastes in both writing and books have changed immensely. I knew I still had a story kicking here with FOSTERED, so I could have ended the series I just had one thought that held me back: why end it when it feels like it’s only just begun?

For a very long time, I severely misunderstood MANY of my characters in Fostered. Is this because I don’t characterize and blindly pants all of my novels hahahah possibly. Keeping in mind that the FOSTERED novels on average usually only took me about 2-5 months to complete, despite writing with these babes for 5 years, I still failed to understand them as characters. I don’t think this is exactly wrong--I understood as much as I needed to get through the first five books. 

However, this idea that my characters were beyond what I’d made for them really confronted me when I started writing book six. I soon realized that literally 90% of the cast is made up of garbage people I absolutely love, and that in general, I really like writing about dark, strange, unsettling things. But this realization came as I was writing the sixth book in the series--very late! Though I acknowledge at some point FOSTERED will cease to be (rip), this idea of leaving it when there was, to say it simply, SO MUCH JUICY TEA, would feel like an injustice. 

This is where this book comes into play! Although this isn’t a chapter update (more of a preliminary intro, if you will), I’ve had some time to think about the novel itself. Though I still really don’t have solid footing on the plot, it’s got an aesthetic and that’s... enough??

I made a mini moodboard of all the things HOUSES WITH TEETH. Here it is:

Process:

I’ve been struggling a lottttt with this book lately because I honestly don’t know what it is?? So far I know a few major things like Reeve being 20 and living in NYC, Foster being a central character, etc etc, but the book hasn’t materialized beyond these things? I feel very headless working on this project, which I know means I need to do a lot more thinking/planning before diving in. Because it’s slightly different from the rest of the books, it’s taking a bit more elbow grease to work into.

I recently changed the tense from present to past, and I think this helped?? Possibly?? I don’t exactly know what the story is in past tense, but I also didn’t know what it was in the present so lol I think the experimentation is good for me. For now, I’ve kind of put this guy on the back burner while I work on other things, but I have drafted some of it, the first ‘present’ version in a writing sprint because girl needed a push, and the second ‘past’ version pretty recently. I do like both, though they kind of achieve different things. I was having trouble keeping momentum with the present version, hence the switch, but I am having trouble transferring Reeve’s cynicism into the past. 

I am not fully certain on plot yet because of these things, so I’m not confident enough to share a summary, but I do have some excerpts! With that said, there’s a lot that could change, so everything I share here is malleable/could change. 

Excerpts:

The first excerpts I’ll share are from the ‘present’ version of this story, which is how I initially started drafting! I do like a lot of it, I just don’t think I can keep up with the tense without running out of steam.

This is the opening. I’ll share both from the present and past tense versions so you can see how different they are (because oh boy are they!). For some context, Reeve is cleaning up some broken herb planter pots from her sink after she believes Ethel, the ghost in her apartment, has knocked them down:

The apartment is haunted but Joel won’t get a priest until he sees proof. You won’t see proof of the paranormal, I’ve explained, but Joel doesn’t care. Joel is atheist and my landlord. He thinks Christians are Satan worshippers, and I haven’t ever disagreed. But there’s a ghost. Her name is Ethel.

Ethel is twenty and was murdered in this apartment. A cold case. She hates New York City, too buzzy, too fluid, the traffic vulgar and boring. I intuit Ethel, which sounds like bullshit, because it is. I doubted her and she cut my hair in my sleep. Ethel hates this apartment.

idk what is up with the sentence structure here but:

Once I’ve cleared the first pot from the sink, I work on the next, a wilted clump of cilantro. Unrooting it from the splinters of terracotta and placing whatever I can salvage on a paper towel. The de-potted herbs intestinal, like webbings of medicinal veins. Ollie’s movie muttering. The motor of the refrigerator gruelling and wet. In my head I tick off the herbs I’ve saved so far: thyme, rosemary, parsley, dill. All the pots empty and bagged for the garbage. I grab the notepad from the fridge and make a note: buy better pots. 

In the middle of cleaning up the pots, Reeve gets a phone call and answers, assuming it’s her landlord/roommate/semi-boyfriend Joel. I wrote all of this during a writing sprint with my buddies and I haven’t looked at it since. There are parts I like and some parts I don’t lol: 

Static echoes through the speaker and it’s a telemarketer, a wrong number, a prank call from two teenage girls in Indiana, Ethel on the other line. But then there’s a clink and someone clearing their throat. “You’re in Manhattan?”

The familiar swell of his voice through the line is like the shaft of a finger tracing the notches of my spine. His voice crackles, bad connection, and I want to use it as an excuse to hang up, but don’t. I finger the leftover bits of terracotta in the sink, swirling the mud against the stainless steel.

“Who is this?” I say this because it’s easier. There are not explanations if I’m just from the city. The distant shimmer of music from his side fills the dead air, the melody gentle. Outside, Marty from the convenience store walks her golden retriever, bustling through the suburban neighborhood across the road. The woman who just started her shift at the apartment’s lobby smokes absently on the drive-up. I put the phone between my shoulder and my ear and gnaw at my fingernails.

“Your brother.” I picture him on the veranda of some Delaware beach house, playing lazy games of Parcheesi with Harrison, his hair long and unattractive to the girl he tries to impress at the public pool. Sharing a cigarette with his roommate-boyfriend-co-worker. The tobacco protruding into his lungs, feeding through his throat.

Marty and her dog have made it to the streetlamp outside of the complex; Marty on the phone, the dog sniffing at a fire hydrant. I lean over the sink and mix bits of plant fertilizer and water from the drain with my pinkie. It’s easy to imagine him by the ocean, the porch of his new place gritty with sand. The ice cream truck whirring lazily around the block.

Blowing smoke from the cigarette out the window, onto Marty and her dog, “How did you get this number?”    

“Your ad in the paper. I’m calling to fill that position.”

This is the last of ‘present’ HWT that I’ll share which I do rather like! This is the continuation of their conversation:

“I think you have the wrong number.” It’s the only thing I can think of to say. I last saw Lonan nine, ten, eleven months ago, in an unmemorable daze. Sitting glumly in the shade of the cabin with a magazine and cigarette, staring sunward as we rolled out of the lot. Bristles of burr bushes, mosquitoes nipping at his elbows. His phone call feels criminal.

“Why Manhattan?” he asks.

“Better restaurants.”

“I want to fill that room you’re renting.”

“And what about Harrison?”

“He’ll come.”

“It’s an ad for a couch. You can’t both stay on the couch.”

These excerpts are from the ‘past’ version of HWT, again, the first page or so (unedited as well):

Three summers after my father died, he called the phone in my apartment and abruptly hung up. I’d heard his voice for only a second, a brief hello, and it was only when I considered the disconnect to be my fault—a clumsy fumble of the thumb, that I remembered he was dead. It was an easy write off. My father had been appearing in my dreams for six months before he first called. I told no one because I didn’t have to. I convinced myself I was going crazy. I lit a cigarette and smoked over the herb planter Joel and I had set up the week before. No matter how much I tried, every single one died. A half hour after the call, off the brim of a cornfield, a young woman named Ethel was fished out of a silo and pronounced dead. 

So we have a very different first sentence/conflict, idk what this even is lool.

The following is the rest of what I’ve written. We kind of see the present version strung through to this version. This excerpt also introduces a new idea that Reeve’s been following this story religiously since it broke (which isn’t in the original).

My father was dead, Ethel was dead, the herbs in the planter were dead. I didn’t make a connection because there wasn’t one. I just followed her story on my walks to work, the easy flight downstairs to the bakery Liu only hired me at because she pitied me. Flipping through the newspapers Liu had out front for five dollars a copy on my lunchbreak, stashed behind a bulk order of red bean paste in the back room when I wanted to finish it later. In headlines, from the first arrest, to the first release, to the first plea from her parents—Ethel was only twenty. With my hair up, down, my tennis shoes on, off, on break when I should’ve been rolling filo pastry, I followed her story. Until it went cold and everyone forgot about Ethel and she became unremembered, unmemorable, unsolved. It was that easy, that tragic. 

A week after her headlines ran out, she started turning the water in our shower on and off. She started turning on the TV and ejecting Ollie’s film noir rentals from the library. She started tugging on my necklaces and unscrewing the bolt of my sunglasses. The apartment was haunted I told Joel, but he didn’t believe me. He wanted proof—there would never be proof, and this is the only reason I called Foster back. 

(for context she’s calling Foster for ghost hunting troubles because she knows he’s concerned he too is being haunted why do I only write about ghosts is this becoming an issue)

I like both and I think I want to find a way to fuse both together? I think both achieve different things so this is very dependant on what I’m going for! I’m at a bit of a loss, so I’ve been letting it sit and also being inspired by @sarahkelsiwrites break through with her novel and the beautiful prose she’s been pumping out! Let me know: which version do you like better? I’m still going to keep the past tense for now, but we’ll see how it goes when I dive into edits (hopefully soon!). Who knows, maybe none of this writing will end up in the final thing--we’ll have to see! 

If you’re struggling with novel openings, I feel you! I’ll keep you updated as I trek through the first chapter/sort out my thoughts, but I hope you liked this post! I know it’s a bit different than usual as I’m having a visible crisis lol, but thank you for reading!

--Rachel

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Here are the questions I was most curious about: 5, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 30, 31, 36, 37, 41, 46, & 47. Hope you have fun answering them! :)

oooh these look fUN!

The Basics:

5. How much writing do you get done on an averageday?

lol none!! jk, though this is kind of the answer…? I don’t often write during the week because I spend the majority of my afternoons/nights on schoolwork (the grinddd), so on most nights, it’s about 0-15 words? Though this is very unpredictable, because there are some nights I do have time to write, and I on average write about 200 words during those sessions! I usually don’t break 1k during these writing sessions (unless I’m on vacation and things are really flowing)!

10.  Doyou set yourself deadlines?

No actually! I’ve never really been a deadlines person (is this why I get nothing done lol), but with my writing, I don’t (of course writing for school is an exception)!

The Specifics:

13.  Describeyour writing process from idea to polished

Ooooh I don’t even think I have a writing process, but if I were to list it: 

Get an idea. 

I admittedly don’t do this very often (new ideas specifically) because I’ve been writing the same series for five years help

The idea phase might include basic conflict, plot points, etc, though it’s usually vague. 

Work out the characters

This is very intuitive for me because I’m a pantser. Usually I can just feel out a narrator/the pov (my process involves a lot of guess work)

Start writing! 

Pray this all works out

When the draft is done, edit! A lot! Though I’m admittedly not very good at this lol

Here’s an example of what writing my latest short story (untitled so far) has looked like:

Get an idea

This was a one sentence note I jotted down in my phone: girl moves in with her sister and boyfriend

Work out the characters

 I first put a name to the main character because I can’t really work with a character if I don’t know their name/a distinct characteristic, and I was starting from nothing! I also knew she had a sister, an ex girlfriend (intuitively) and her sister’s boyfriend, so I put names to them too.

I then fleshed these characters out. For example:

Linda: MC, quiet, kind of weird, lives with her sister… WHY? because she’s dropped out of college/has gone through a breakup HOW? her sister agrees she can live in her house so long as she helps renovate it, WHAT is this house? Her mother’s property, an old commune her sister is now trying to uphaul etc etc etc

 Start writing!

I refer to writing I like in times of feeling stuck/try to identify if there’s a problem a few lines before. 

And so on! 

14.  Howdo you deal with self-doubts?

Oh boy… I usually just like to remind myself that no one is a perfect writer: even the words I looove in my favourite books/from my favourite writers probably didn’t always come easy

15.  Howdo you deal with writer’s block?

omg I cry. I’ve cried so many times because of writer’s block lol hahahahaaa. I’ll be honest: I usually don’t feel motivated enough to find solutions to writer’s block, so when I run into a block, I like to give myself the chance to just… take a break? I often find I have writer’s block because I’ve been working all day, and I realllyyyy want to write 500 000 words in the 10 minutes I have to write before I need to hit the hay, which doesn’t create a very good environment to write in? So taking a break is helpful. Writing something else (like a short story, an alternate storyline or even notes for the book) helps too!

16.  Howmany drafts do you need until you’re satisfied with a project?

For the majority of my work (fostered), I’ve actually only ever written one draft of every book, but I’d still say I’m satisfied with a lot of the work. I could go back and continuing editing/redrafting, but I love the idea of preserving improvement through every book (especially for that series). For the excerpts I share on here, they don’t really go through many passes of editing? Maybe two passes for line edits! Though I’d say this is case by case, that’s just my experience with fostered! I also edit as I go, so that’s a factor to consider as well. 

17.  Whatwriting habits or rituals do you have?

GREEN. TEA. 

18.  Ifyou could collaborate with anyone, who would it be, and what would you writeabout?

Oh man… Just going to shout out my literary moms (and moms in general): @sssoto​, @shaelinwrites​, @sarahkelsiwrites​

19.  Howdo you keep yourself motivated?

I’m so bad at keeping myself motivated, lols, I give up on myself a lot! I would love to be motivated all the time, but this can become really difficult! I find that consistently working/thinking about/doing anything related to my projects is helpful! Even if I can’t write every day (which I definitely don’t), even just thinking about my characters for a few minutes can help keep up momentum. 

20.  Howmany WIPs and story ideas do you have?

Not very many! For novels, I only have the FOSTERED series which is (unfortunately loool) ongoing. I have a few short story ideas I’m tinkering with. Though I don’t have many projects! (my brain can only come up with ideas for fostered I-)

The Favourites

21.  Whois/are your favourite character(s) to write?

Yessss let me pick between my children!! mwahahaha. In order for fostered’s main squad:

Lonan (ew)

Reeve

Harrison

Darren

Foster

Foster gets no credit he’s truly so interesting I just like horrible people (which I would say this list is in order of too hahahaah). We need justice for Foster this is blasphemy. 

As for side characters that are interesting to write with:

Lincoln

Izzy

Emily

Anna

22.  Whois/are your favourite pairing(s) to write?

Oh I looove writing about (in order): 

Lonan/Harrison

Give. Me. The. Drama. This just in, they’ve been beefing for five books straight, and it’s still not over!

Also my entire sketchbook is just them help

Lonan/Reeve

Always trying to come for each other’s wigs, but if someone dare get in the way of their siblingship, they’ll magically team back up and cut YOU

Reeve/Darren

A new favourite! When you try to be nice to a new person you meet and then she won’t stop trying to marry you

Reeve/Izzy

Reeve and her mother have such an interesting relationship because they are basically the same person. Except neither of them realize this? You wanna drink cheap margaritas and smoke cigarettes in your motel room with your daughter? Sign me uppp

Foster/Harrison

This friendship be stronger than my wig y’all, you want some bromance in your life? Bromance you shall RECIEVE. 

Reeve/Emily

The amount of… shit? these girls get into? I love it?? Give me moreee they’re so magically mischievous together

Reeve/Foster

This relationship gets no credit (my fault) but I’m really loving planning the evolution of their relationship especially in the next books, as they’ve gone from lovers to friends to ghost busting partners? We stan? (how did this happen) 

25.  Favouritepart of writing

In terms of process, I love drafting the most! Picking words is also fun lol

26.  Favouritewriting program

Microsoft Word is my bitch.

30.  Favouriteidea you haven’t started on yet

Does the intro to book 7 count? We got overdue rent, we got running from your problems and a ghostbusting alliance, who could ask for more? (truly just want to finish book 6 and write this book!)

The Dark

31.  Leastfavourite part of writing

I’ll say revisions, not because I don’t like revisions, but because I’m very bad at revising my own work. I can target the problems, but can’t find solutions.

The Fun

36.  Lastsentence you wrote

I’ll keep in touch and send his daughters souvenirs—Iheart NY, Lady Liberty printed on t-shirts. 

37.  Firstsentence or your current WIP

I’m going to share the first sentence of the chapter I’m working on since I’ve shared the first sentence of the book before and I *despise* it:

Whenmy mother was nineteen, she packed up her stuff from small town Minnesota andmoved to New York.

The Rest of It

41.  Anyadvice for new/beginning/young writers?

Take it easy! Write what you’re interested in--not what you think you should write, and allow yourself room to make mistakes. There are no failures in writing: you’re always going to learn something, so don’t get caught up in the fear of something not being good (

46.  Doyou reread your own stories?

Yes! I find it’s harder to when I’ve sent it to someone (teacher, friends etc etc) and I’m worried it’ll be bad, but I really do enjoy reading my own work. It’s just nice to transport to a different place in my head. Also narrating my work is so entertaining, lol. I read my old books to fall asleep often (I’m currently re-reading book 5 of fostered). 

47.  Bestway to procrastinate

What’s the best way not to? (My personal fave is re-reading all my old notes instead of writing)

Thank you for the questions! :))

--Rachel

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Palm Reading + Mandarin | Fostered Writing Update

Hey People of Earth!

It’s been *years* since I wrote my last writing update, and seeming as though I have some time to draft this, I thought I’d pop another one your way!

This update is going to cover the writing haps from FOSTERED!

The last FOSTERED update I posted was in October, so here’s a summary of what’s happened in the last few months:

I drafted Palm Reading and Dark Room from October to November

^ And then never wrote anything in December

Literally had a crisis

What’s New

These last few chapters of this book were not happening? I’ve probably drafted a total of four chapters this entire semester because of how little time I have to write, which isn’t fun. I was having a hard time balancing writing for school, and writing for myself, so my book definitely suffered a lil bit. 

In terms of plot summary, the squad has been at a cabin in Oregon for the last few weeks. I’ve translated this to literally only two chapters, however, it will physically pain me to keep writing in this setting, so I’m moving on! The first chapter I’ll be updating you on is called Palm Reading. 

I mentioned in my last FOSTERED update that this book is currently split into two parts: part one being tentatively titled ‘Children’. PALM READING is the first chapter of part two, and also, the first full chapter at The Cabin. In my last update, I talked about the squad arriving at the cabin. I thought I’d flesh this out more in this update! (Also: I’m hoping to make a 3D model of the cabin in the future--I already have all the blueprints!)

The cabin is owned by Lonan’s (deceased) father, and is now inhabited by Reeve + Lonan’s sister, Christiane, who now goes by Anna. Bad Things happen at this cabin, which is why I’m swinging out early! PALM READING is split into five scenes:

All you have to know: the squad has travelled across the universe to cheer Lonan up because he’s going through some Tough Times. This is, of course, a very bad idea. 

Scene A:

This scene is a flashback Reeve recounts of her and her sister as children before their mother’s fancy garden party. 

Scene B:

Reeve makes French onion soup for Lonan in an attempt to cheer him up. Her estranged mother, Izzy, tries to help, to no avail. 

Tbh, this scene could be cut lol. It’s very short, and not super interesting in my opinion! Though I’m not very fond of this chapter in general. 

Scene C:

Lonan doesn't like Reeve’s soup (apparently this whole chapter is just soup?? we should just call it soup???), and dissociates when he encounters Anna’s son. He gets a lil violent and Darren steps in to save ze day (a valiant boi). 

Fun fact: I wrote an entire mini story with Lonan and Harrison, recounting the aftermath of this encounter (see more below ;))

Scene D:

Anna and Reeve hang on the porch, and Reeve fantasizes about what her life would be like if her sister was still in her life beyond childhood. 

Scene E:

Reeve leaves her sister on the porch and her and Darren have some timezzzzzz. 

Fun fact:

This chapter was originally called just PALM before I started writing this update. I wasn’t mega happy with the title, but I like it a lot more as this expansion!

Yo dis chapter the whole alphabet or what?? I’m not particularly happy with it because it’s not cohesive at all?? I found I wrote a ton of tiny lil scenes that didn’t fit together very well, lol. I think if I cut the scene breaks and integrated the chapter into three bigger scenes, this would’ve been a lot more effective. The reason most of these scenes are so tiny, is because I believe I wrote this chapter over a very long period of time. I find if I leave a chapter for too long between breaks, it just isn’t very good since I lose a lot of momentum.  

Excerpts:

I’ll share the whole first scene! Not my *favourite* scene but is ok:

Izzy made it clear it was a garden party, even though we didn’t have a garden. She’d rewritten her plans on her toile stationary from Paris, and pinned the leaflets to the fridge so the neighbours would think she looked rich. She bought a red check pinafore from the Goodwill and pretended it was designer. Her panty hose were sheer and black and made her look like an off-brand prostitute.

The neighbours would be in by three. Christiane and I set the table with the good cutlery, and hung Chinese lanterns from the doorways. Izzy lit the tea lights and peeled the carrots over the sink.

Before the guests arrived, Christiane and I played out by the marsh. We hopped puddles and skipped rocks. We practiced our Spanish in ruled notebooks even though Izzy enrolled us in French. We caught crickets and brown-bellied spiders in bug boxes, and ate crackers and deli meat, and the leftover frog legs Izzy bought from the bistro. The Tupperware sweat with chervil and nutmeg. She said, Evie, it tastes just like chicken you know, like that somehow made a difference. Izzy yelled at us for scraping our knees when we got back home. The neighbours are going to think I have savages for children. Do you know how mothers with savages for children look?

She made us wash our hair with castile soap, and pinned it back in matching chignons. She dressed Christiane in a tartan smock, and me in a tunic and skirt. She was twelve, I was ten. Izzy pulled her hair into two Dutch braids, and tied off the ends with bits of ribbon from the Christmas wrapping drawer. Dad came home from work late, and said, Izzy, baby, you’re looking so new age, and she cried and had to reapply her lipstick. 

Scene two, three, and four are like, not good, lol, so skipping to scene five!

Scene five gets a lil steamy yeepers--keeping it PG, but just a warning:

You are a system of constellations—all blinking and in order. A life sized Orion, all neon Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka. 

Putting this in for the Darren Roast (also lol look @ me just switching POVs):

You’re so je ne sais quois, you’re so candied and virgin, you’re so liberal, it hurts. You kiss me like we’re dating, and maybe we are. Maybe I’m your girlfriend, and you’ll take me to Thanksgiving at your mother’s, and your family will love me, and serve me cranberry sauce and tofurkey and kefir from mason jars.

That’s it for PALM READING!

The chapter I wrote after palm reading is called Dark Room. I briefly mentioned it in a vlog I’m compiling, however, I’m skipping out on writing an update on it because a) nothing is really shareable, and b) the content is kind of too difficult to explain/sift through!

The last thing I wanted to share was this lil adventure I wrote in October called Mandarin. 

MANDARIN is a short-somethin (story??? i say lightly) following the events of PALM READING, and covers Lonan and Harrison in a tent in the woods. ;) I hesitate to call it a story because it’s more just me being a shit disturber to see what I can mess up in my book in a different point of view. ;)

I can’t remember why I wanted to write this, lol. I think it’s just because I was feeling a lil stressed, and writing with my boys is always very fun. I knew things went very wrong for Lonan at the end of PALM READING, so I wanted to take some time to experiment with what exactly happened that the reader doesn't get to see.

The premise is: Harrison is being *nice* and offers to help Lonan fix his face after Darren comes in like Godzilla for his lil noggin, and things Go Wrong. 

(Also: at this point, I’ve written three *shippy* stories with these boyz, and I’ve made it my duty to compile a lil anthology of *ship* and print it out and put it on my shelf. ;))

Excerpts:

I really only included this segment because of this paragraph, not even that I love it, but because Harrison always describes Lonan with such an acute awareness to detail and its soooooooo cuuuuute:

Tangles of dark hair part down Lonan’s scalp, and drift into Harrison’s eyes. It’s getting long, now. He hasn’t had a trim in months. Harrison can measure the days since, like a personal calculator. He’s been paying attention. It’s two inches past his eyes. He hasn’t cut it since April. His skin is white, like the ivory tusks of an elephant, or the swirl of half and half. His eyes marbles of aquamarine, like an expensive China doll. Harrison would import copies and hoard them. Even though he’s bruised around the eyes, the skin puffy, and purple, he’d display him and tell everyone he’s handmade from Russia. 

same

Alrighty folks, that’s it for this update! I’m almost finished an update for a new short story, so keep an eye out for that! My semester finishes on Wednesday, so prepare to see me clutterin’ up your feed in the near future!

--Rachel

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

What do you like best about writing Seventh Virtue?

Okay anon I needed this because I had a mini crisis writing that book where I :) scared myself from continuing :) oops :) tho the positive is that it’s motivated me to finish Feeding Habits lol! But I digress!

What I love most about this project is how much it is teaching me about something I thought I knew everything about. Though of course I know I have gaps in Fostered, I didn’t think there was exponentially more stuff I could learn - maybe I’d get a fact or two more about the characters, but I wasn’t expecting anything more.

But I was so wrong! I love being wrong about writing lol it gives me so much to think about! Such as: that I actually LOVE genre fiction, that I love writing with “my people” (the cast hehe) as adults (are we all having our hello to my 20s I’m having a breakdown moment together?? Yes!), that I love expanding this world so far beyond what it initially was, that I can go back to and celebrate the most fun things I adore about this series. I don’t even really feel limited by my lack of knowledge of the genre writing it anymore (maybe why I’m stuck!)—I feel excited to continue this story that I literally thought was dying.

I kind of touched on this in my most recent YouTube writing update but I actually thought Fostered was almost done. The last time I felt this way, I was 13 or 14 haha, and of course I got literally 5 more books out of it after that thought. But genuinely, this time I thought “after Feeding Habits, I’m done. There’s no more story here to tell.” And that’s the thing with Fostered - every time I’m thinking “well it’s time to move on and be a grown up writer and write grown up writer things and not this stupid disjointed series you started as a literal child” it surprises me! I could very much see SV extending beyond this one book (not sure if it will, but there’s so much fun stuff to explore). While I think that means in a lot of ways that the Moth Work series is done after this (I don’t think I’ll write a book 3 anymore - but we’ll see, I might miss the story haha), I’m always amazed at the newness that can occur when you let go of the reins for a little. I don’t know, I’m feeling emo about this book because I feel like its honeymoon stage is over (way too fast omg cruel world) so it’s really nice to take some time to reflect, thank you for that!

Also a tangible answer: the romance. I love writing the romance so much. My boys. Oh my god. The pining. Oh my god. The tension LMFAO love love love the romance, in fact, here’s an excerpt ignore if this formatting is wonky, Tumblr mobile things ☺️

Lonan and Harrison sharing their first meal ❤️ love forever ❤️

Lonan laid out each pot on the cold floor, then unveiled two plastic plates, and a set of pre-packaged cutlery. “I hope you’re not allergic to anything.”

“So you cut me, arrest me, throw me down here, and now you want to dine with me?”

“Yes,” Lonan said. He ripped open his cutlery packet, slipped out the black fork. As he unloaded bouts of fried rice, mounds of glossed orange chicken, and a generous helping of black pepper beef, he added, “And I didn’t cut you. You did that yourself.”

Harrison snorted. Oh god, was he starving. He wasn’t sure how long he could keep up the façade before he started drooling. “That’s because you were going to stab me in the gut.”

“I wasn’t going to stab you.”

“So what were you going to do with the knife? Use it to play spin the bottle with me?”

Lonan arched a brow. “Would you like to play spin the bottle with me?”

“If you’re the one I’d kiss, then sure.”

I’m BLUSHING ok goodbye!