#prose novel

[lucidloving]

@roach-works // Melissa Broder, "Problem Area" // Mary Oliver, "The Return" // @annavonsyfert // Koyoharu Gotouge, Demon Slayer // Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance // David Levithan, How They Met and Other Stories // Tennessee Williams, Notebooks

[thepersonalwords]

You should only fall in love with someonewhose arms are open, and strong enough to catch you.

Jacqueline Simon Gunn

[elysiumaze]

I don’t miss it, because I have my childhood more now than when it was happening...

Clarice Lispector in, Near to the Wild Heart.

[larkingame]

hello hello! this november bianca (@beeanca-writing ) and I our hosting our very own writing and productivity challenge!

this is an indie (and slightly more lax) alternative to NaNoWriMo, where the focus is routine, accountability and above all else progress!

the rules for this challenge are simple:

prior to friday, november 1st 2024 choose a writing goal. this can be a total word count, daily word count, a page count, a certain number of chapters or an amount of time spent writing. remember to choose something attainable for you in thirty days. make a post on tumblr, discord, substack, twitter...(somewhere) presenting yourself (basically who you are as a writer!) your goal and discussing your writing projects or plans using the tag #novemberwripro!

plan and establish a routine. productivity isn't so much about time management, a packed schedule or any sort of fancy tools. productivity is about consistency. by establishing a writing routine for yourself you'll put yourself into a familiar enough rhythm that not only will you be able to write when you don't necessarily want to--you're setting yourself up to produce the best work you can possible put forth.

use your routine to help you work on your writing goal daily throughout the month of november. the goal of any writing challenge is to show some sort of progress on your current projects after all.

document your progress in some way. whether this be through a month long journal, a vlog on youtube or tiktok or even just posts in the discord server or on tumblr--it's important to reflect on all the work you've done and help build a community of accountability!

all are welcome to join--whether that be novelists, non-fiction writers, interactive fiction developers, fic writers, essayists, poets, screen-writers, academics or those simply looking to do more writing!

helpful links you may need:

challenge discord | substack

[ikarust]

i talk about tearing flesh from an arm with my teeth and you stare at me in horror like you haven't tasted blood before. i talk about being crushed like a small animal on a fast lane and you ask me how it's humanly possible of me to cling to the stone of the sidewalk the way i do. my mother could skin her hands at the sink and it would still not rid her from the truth that is that she has fed me her body and that she is convict to the manslaughter of her child.

quick question: how does one write about their mother without mentioning their mother? mine is a fortune teller. she tells me in the dead of the night while i am on the kitchen floor with the boning knife in one hand and and a towel in the other that i will never be loved right. that i will never find real love. that i will always suffer if i look for it.

mother knows best.

she tells me she destroyed herself for me and that i am selfish and cruel for not destroying myself for her. she begs me to be beautiful. she begs me to be the daughter she wanted to have. my friend tells me on the swing on a beautiful springtime evening that i am selfish and cruel for devouring every little piece of every damn thing that has ever tasted like love to me. and when i go home in the evening, my mother looks at me like she did the night she told me she wishes she'd killed me when i was a child. i tell everyone i am starving. my mother tells me she told me so.

i stare at the red in the ball of spit i hawked onto the bathroom floor. i retouch the scars on my thighs. i hack away at my hair with the big crafting scissors. i pray to god that i will wake up tomorrow beautiful and loveable. i wake up the same way. my mother tells me to never come back when i step out to leave for work. i tell her i am trying my best but nothing is working. she tells me she told me so. she tells me she's glad to see me in pain because i deserve it.

maybe i do deserve it.

i visit a clothing store and step into the fitting room just to see the way i am reflected back and forth in the front-and-back mirrors. i look and i see a morbid, mangled ruin the greatest what-could-have-been of all time. and by that i mean, i see a million possibilities in one. all the girls i could have been. and at the very center, where the image gets so small it's blurry and barely visible maybe i am beautiful. maybe i am loveable. maybe i find real love and maybe i don't suffer for it.

maybe i am the daughter my mother wanted.

[wrathion]

forever and always bitter about how anduin got magically cured from his arthasfication in shadowlands ... i mean yeah the mental issues & trauma are there (somehow...shoutout to tww) but i mean physically!!

what if he lost his heartbeat and it didn't come back after his boss fight. no matter what he does his pulse isn't there, he doesn't know how he's standing and that's scary. what is he now? is he alive? is he dead? will he age? or will he rot on his own two feet like a forsaken? if that's the case, how much time does he have left? is he a ticking time bomb or will he be here long after his other shorter-life-span friends & adopted family die (assuming he even manages to make it that far)

granted, his mawsworn design in shadowlands was more a visual shorthand to the players that he was Evil Now than anything, he was just as alive as before, just possessed. he could seemingly be swapped between his original looking self and mawsworn self in the kyrestria cutscene? but i digress, the pale skin & hair? the blank eyes? Surely something had to have gone wrong with the amount of time he was stuck like that

[outstanding-quotes]

Now that he was trying to find something out from me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

[hoppipolla]

Did Tae Mhyung Ha know? That he seemed very lonely sometimes. Regardless of the solid flesh or distinct features, at times like that, he seemed like someone who would soon disappear.

LOVE FOR LOVE'S SAKE dir. Kim Kyun Ah (2024)

[lucidloving]

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena // Alain de Botton, Essays in Love // Eden Robinson, "Writing Prompts for the Broken-Hearted" // Chloe Liese, Always Only You // Anne Carson and Euripides, An Oresteia // Two—Sleeping At Last // Studio Bones, SK8 the Infinity // Trista Mateer, "is it okay to say this?" // @moodylilac // D. H. Lawrence, "The Rainbow"

[localcosmicvoid]

"But the point is to live."

Slow Sunday rereading The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus & trying to find meaning again

[elektramouthed]

 I told him it was about meaning, and he suggested, very politely, that might be a kind of psychosis.  ‘You think meaning is psychosis?’  ‘An obsession with meaning, at the expense of the ordinary shape of life, might be understood as psychosis, yes.’  ‘I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.'  [...] I said, ‘How would you define psychosis?’  He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil:  Psychosis: out of touch with reality.  Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.

Jeanette Winterson, from Lighthousekeeping

[xxrrisxx]

And yet the only exciting life is the imaginary one.

Virginia Woolf

[home-for-artists]

"As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too."

-The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

[thepersonalwords]

Just don’t promise her the moon. She simply isn’t the type that would buy such a story. She only cares about love and nothing else. Can you tell her you love her?

Natalie Ansard, The Lover from Fifth Avenue

[wandereralix]

I wrote a poem about it, and then threw it away, because that's the last thing I need right now: More words dedicated to people who will never dedicate a single thing to me.

- Charlotte Green

[keatingwilde]

maybe romanticising my degree is the only viable option to get me through it