#privtag

[bakedbakermom]

ffs i dreamed my ENTIRE NOVEL last night but all i remember is shoplifting from an alchemist (bad idea), a train to the afterlife, a two-headed bear, and the reunification of a country by hugging everyone on the broken road home.

[bakedbakermom]

This is why the character whose death kicks off my novel maaaaay just have to come back. Can't let my protag off the hook, and her being the one to bring him back, in a way he would absolutely hate but she does it because she can't bear it anymore, will shatter the reader's heart.

controversial opinion but bringing characters back from the dead is fine and doesn't cheapen the existence of death and mortality if there are sufficient emotional and narrative consequences. i'm talking guilt, i'm talking lingering resentment and grief, i'm talking rejection from those who've already begun to move on, i'm talking complicated feelings about being returned to a life you departed from without grace or preparation without your consent and now have to deal with the fallout of, i'm talking repressed feelings that cannot be acknowledged without hurting everyone involved, because you can bring back what was lost but what happened cannot be undone. and that's why i could fight marvel studios and win.

[bakedbakermom]

the capitol city is The Coin. it rises in the center of an ancient and massive crater called The Well. (legend has it The Well is the wellspring from which The Grandmothers dreamed the dream of the world.) atop is The Spire, below is The Drip.

honestly i cannot put into words how much better this story is becoming now that i've taken it out of the real world and put it in a mafalia situation.

[bakedbakermom]

Innaeve. My protagonist's name is Innaeve. Her brother is/was Tommelin.

The only good thing about insomnia is that sometimes I think myself in spirals instead of circles and finally get somewhere.

[bakedbakermom]

Her black skin slick in the inky sea

[bakedbakermom]

If I name the sex worker character in my fae u Petaline, is that too obvious a reference?

[bakedbakermom]

All right how's this for an opening line:

Innaeve stared into her dwindling tumbler of whiskey and thought about drowning. She has been thinking about drowning for seven months, three weeks, four days and -- she peered over her shoulder out the window, where the clock in the square was just barely visible -- about nine hours.

[bakedbakermom]

The problem is, you see, what I thought was the starting point of my story actually works much much better as a flashback. She cannot walk in and find him and then begin her mission of revenge. We have to meet her in the middle of her mission, see her plagued by memories of love and loss, so that our hearts break along with hers. We must journey with her in the present towards the moment where she loses herself, while also looking back with her to the moment she lost him. And then we forge her into what she will become next.

Sorry Innaeve, you're my blorbo now, and I must torment you even more.

[bakedbakermom]

oh. the dreaming beneath the skin of the world. that's where she always finds him. that's what she realizes. she can reach through.

[bakedbakermom]

oh shit alt opening for fae u T doesn't start off dead but missing and then N gets a clue he's alive and then it becomes a story of rescue instead of revenge, that desperation is gonna really work yessssssssssssss

[bakedbakermom]

Hey so tell me if this is a dumb idea but I can't shake this idea for my fae u of the capitol city being The Coin. A floating circle (maybe magic, maybe a natural formation that was built around over time) with a regular city on the top and like a dangling city on the bottom???

Because the whole fae world is based on balance and that there must always be two sides??

[bakedbakermom]

Whats the plot of your fae-u?

Our protagonist, N, is a changeling in a world where the fae are "out" but not exactly safe - think Grishaverse or Scholomance. Our story begins with the murder of her twin brother. She and her small group of trusted weirdos try to solve his murder while N tries to hold on to her humanity.

In this world, all fae are born with no powers, essentially humans who don't "pass", with one fae parent and one human. Around the age of maturity (or possibly just the fairytale age of 16) they can Choose to become fully fae and enter into the protection of their clade, but some choose to stay human-ish and live a short mortal life. (No one knows why fae can't reproduce with fae, but as their religion has been developing in my head, it has something to do with the Grandmothers who dreamt the world.)

In some countries, the full fae are enslaved; in others, hunted as abomination along with the changeling children. N and her group live in a country where they are more or less granted full human rights, at least on paper; the mortal king married one of the fae princesses (two courts, Winter and Summer, with a Crone/Grandmother, a Queen/Mother, and a Princess/Maiden in each) about a generation ago after a bloody war of independence in which the fae turned the tide.

So there are no shortage of suspects and plenty of danger for our friends to face. N and her twin (T) were orphans, left at the doorstep of the Foundling house when they were just hours old. They grew up scrambling for anything they could get, relying wholly and only on each other, so N is lost and devastated when he's gone.

So far my other cast of characters is:

Another set of twins (Winter Court,names ending in aesh and aell) who were born into slavery and escaped after Choosing; they're abyssal monsters in their fae form, but live in the mortal world as tavern owners.

Priscilline, essentially a Summer Court succubus as designed by Disney and Hustler.

J, bff of the late T, possible love interest to N. Human as they come and lives in the fae ghetto because it's the only place that would rent to an immigrant/someone with his skin color.

Pitro, also human, obsessed with the fae. If he can't be one, he can sure as hell sleep with as many of them as possible. Lovable manwhore with a dark secret.

There are two other minor characters I'm still fleshing out (a satyr and an ice sylph) who may get bumped up to main cast.

And M. Oh you're going to love to hate M. She makes Drusilla from btvs look like your sainted auntie.

Thank you for the ask, it really helped me think through some details!!

[bakedbakermom]

something like ... When the world was young and soft a d wild, when humans first began to map at the foamy waters of consciousness, some of it spilled--into their dreams, into their nightmares, into their stories

[bakedbakermom]

new curse phrase i came up with last night while stoned and brainstorming my fae u;

empty hell

because hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

[bakedbakermom]

Oh my god ive fucking got it. I was thinking the Veil lefting was like, 50ish years ago. Post WW2. But now I'm thinking it has to be earlier than that. At least a century. That would put me at just the right level of steampunk to have my fae-u set in like the 90/early 00s. I wonder what their cell phones are like.

[bakedbakermom]

i think the problem with my fae au novel (or fae-u if you will) is that i have it set too close to the present and haven't properly accounted for how history would have played out with a fae influence, even if they weren't "out" until more recently. i might need to pull a more steampunk approach and have the fae district (tentatively called little avalon) be way more weird than the rest of the human city. like everything is too close to the real world now and it feels like writing from inside a box.