#thank you for the representation mr sims (the writer)

[sk0rbut]

what’s gayer then a librarian? an UNDERGROUND librarian- welcome to the magnus archives where we take “be gay do crime” a little too far- happy pride month everyone :]

[himboholhorse-moving]

oo!!! 1 2 4 5 8 10 11 13 15 17 21 22 29?

Yeehaw !!!

1) If someone wanted to really understand you, what would they read, watch, and listen to?

How many showtunes can one listen to before being driven insane. But I’d say Falsettos and Fun Home. “Last Podcast on the Left” is what really drove me to get my podcast on campus. I’d also say to watch like, a TON of old movies because those are a Big hyperfixation of mine. In particular I love Peter O’Toole and James Stewart, as well as Malcolm McDowell. I’d also say Milk and The Times of Harvey Milk. “M*A*S*H” as well is really big to me, ofc. Mmmmm as far as reading I can’t really think of anything. I love the Romanticism-era poetry tho. I also really love “Hamlet” and “Macbeth” and “The Things They Carried.” Watching and reading Ordinary People is also very big and close to my heart.

2) Have you ever found a writer who thinks just like you? if so, who?

I probably have but I can’t think of any rn h a. I CAN say that the symmetry of Wes Anderson films is intensely pleasing to my OCD ass. (Shoutout to Prozac btw.) Like, that shit is just SO good to me and I’m like Mr. Anderson. You Get It.

4) Do you like your name?  is there another name you think would fit you better?

I quite like my name and also like Sheridan, which was almost my name, whether I was born male or female. Would have gotten named after a tank tho so. We All Have To Make Sacrifices. Feel free to call me Hawkeye too!

5) Do you think of yourself as a human being or a human doing? do you identify yourself by the things you do?

Bro I’m just existing. I’m just kinda here doing shit and being shit and being perceived by others and not liking being perceived differently than how I see myself. But for like, my WHOLE life my identity was based around my academic achievements which blows so I don’t like to identify myself by anything academic now. I’d like to be identified by my kindness and passion for things.

8) What musical artists have you most felt connected to over your lifetime?

I grew up listening to the B.B. King and Eric Clapton album “Riding With The King” and I have a very vivid memories connected to that album, like ones of a better time in childhood. All Time Low as well, I’ve been listening to them since my freshman year of high school. Anything classic rock really but Journey has just been a big thing around me since middle school. MCR and FOB were also bands I listened to growing up, as well as Panic!. Franz Ferdinand I started listening to 2 years ago but I love their stuff. I also have a soft spot for classical music but can’t name any people in particular. I’m a big fan of Dvorak’s “New World Symphony”, the 4th movement specifically. It slaps. “Adagio for Strings” by Barber as well! I’ll also say Shura.

There’s a video of the 4th movement of the “New World Symphony” being performed for the Pope I believe and that conductor is just OFF THE SHITS it’s so good.

10) Do you have a creed?

Not really, not that I can think of. I just try and believe that I should give people the benefit of the doubt or at least, consider other emotions and reason why people are acting a certain way and not just immediately dismissing them. I try and keep an open mind about most things, just taking everything into consideration before I pass judgment or judgments.

11) Describe your ideal day.

Oooh, I’m going back into the brain bank for this one.

Bringing back “Riding With The King”, a cool summer day, doors open and letting the air come in. My favorite music played loud, I’m hanging out with my friends and loved ones, having drinks and eating good food out in the backyard, playing in the old inflatable pool by the back deck that made jumping in real easy. Having grilled shish kebobs, watching the sunset and looking at the stars in the night sky, chasing the dog around in the backyard, looking at the fireflies.

Another later memory was getting up at a good time, the windows are open and it’s a crisp spring morning, I’m at the desktop computer playing The Sims 2 loaded up with custom content from the now-defunct Sims 2 website exchange. My dad makes a big breakfast of pancakes, bacon, eggs, English muffins with apple butter. He probably found a war movie on TV. I’m making plans with my best friend Kim to come over the next weekend or the weekend after. I just get to act like I’m a regular kid with a regular family and things are good.

13) Inside or outdoors?

INSIDE... unless it’s cool out, in which case outside. I’d love to have a screened-in porch someday. I hate bugs.

15) Five most influential books over your lifetime.

HOO okay let’s think. The “Shiloh” series and the “Warrior Cats” series. “The Things They Carried” as well as “Ordinary People.” I’d also say the “Harry Potter” series because that was really big for me growing up. I’m gonna fudge this and add “Twilight” and “Vladimir Tod” because I loved vampire fiction. “Frankenstein” as well, and “Hamlet.”

17) Would you say your Tumblr is a fair representation of the “real you”?

I’m a lot dumber in real life. Beez pucciverse just saw a video of me last night eating a stick of butter. I’m just an impulsive idiot and y’all should be thankful and grateful I don’t post EVERYTHING going thru my mind because I have to weigh if it’s better for Tumblr or Twitter HSKDFHSKJF. But I’m very Not Smart.

21) Do you love easily?

I have a stuffed animal right next to me that I’ve had since I was 5 so I’d say so !! Cheer Bear has. Seen A Lot.

22) List the top five things you spend the most time doing, in order.

OOO okay... Sleeping, watching YouTube videos/movies/TV, playing Revue Starlight or other games but that’s about tied with YT/movies/TV, listening to music/podcasts, and writing a podcast script!

29) Three songs that you connect with right now.

Mmm “What’s It Gonna Be?” by Shura, “I’m Still Standing” by Elton John, and “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie!!

Thanks for asking all these questions !! It was a lot of fun

[antiquery]

yuletide letter

hi! first of all, i want to thank you! i’ve been writing fic for years and watching yuletide from the sidelines (often being v impressed), and this is both my first yuletide and my first exchange, period. i’m really excited! 

general likes & dislikes

i’ll read just about anything if it’s well-written. some things i like, in general terms: power imbalances (healthy and not), complicated and ambiguous family (found or otherwise) dynamics, anything classically or literarily inspired, anything with religious overtones of any kind, unconventional governing metaphors (i once wrote 8k of lovecraft fic guided by the premise of thomas hobbes’ leviathan, ok), worldbuilding, negotiations of personhood, unexpected humanism, sharp interrogations of the world of the source material where necessary or interesting. things i dislike, in general: aus, unless very specific and near & dear to your heart, modern aus in particular, and almost nothing else? sex is fine, if it makes sense in the context of the story, just nothing too out there (though i have nothing against emotional and/or physical awfulness). rating isn’t an issue.

really i don’t have many hard & fast rules! i encourage you to be as out-of-the-box weird and creative as you like.

lovecraft mythos

characters requested: randolph carter, nyarlathotep

it is unfortunate but true that when i was 13 i saw the phantom of the opera in nyc, and it was profoundly formative, and ever since then the daemon lover has been one of my absolute favorite tropes. what can i say, i’m a sucker for the gothic. and this is a...very gothic ship, in the sense that it’s mostly about being pursued by the strange and terrifying, but also being drawn to that, against your better judgement and sometimes against your will. what i would love to see is a resolution of the problem the end of dream-quest poses in the context of the mythos: namely, why doesn’t carter end up dead? it’s kind of silly to propose that it’s really the thought of home that saves him, when you look at the fates of lovecraft’s other protagonists who run up against gods; ruthanna emrys argues in her article on the story that the end is nyarlathotep testing him, deliberately playing with him just for the fun of it. in that case, what is it about carter that draws nyarlathotep to him? why is this human in particular interesting enough to let live? and is that interest genuine curiosity, or bored cruelty, or something in between? for carter’s part, how does he feel about being pretty much completely at the mercy of something that thinks of him (from what he can tell) as a toy, and how does he reconcile the fact that he’s drawn to nyarlathotep in the sense that he’s been drawn to the otherworldly all his life with the very real possibility that he might meet a horrible fate at his hands? established relationship fic could be fun too, with both of them trying to deal with a. the massive power imbalance and b. the moral disparity, in that one party has morals and the other very much does not.

also, worldbuilding, if you like! the dreamlands are such a rich setting, at once very standard Portal-Fantasy-Land and incredibly not, strange and alien and wonderful in the way that only a place crafted out of dreams could be. how does that work, by the way— are certain regions representative of the dreams of certain people? what are the lives of the inhabitants like, the people who exist in a world created by the dreams of other people? how do they feel about gods, or dreamers, or both? how does magic work? government? society? technology? religion?

jonathan strange & mr norrell

characters requested: john childermass, john uskglass/the raven king, john segundus

this is less of a universe that i feel needs interrogating and expansion in the way that the dream cycle does, because clarke is so thorough, and there’s already such a developed world. instead, remember what i said about the gothic? yeah. jsamn has in common with the dream cycle that element and also a sense of profound individual insignificance— the scene at the end, with strange & norrell experiencing the effects of stephen’s and the king’s magic, sent chills down my spine. i’d love an exploration of who/what the raven king actually is, how he came to be as this strange embodiment of the fundamentally alien and wild element of both the northern english landscape and national character, and how childermass & segundus respectively relate to him. i could for sure go for a weird love triangle and/or triad— segundus and his wide-eyed fascination with magic, uncompromisingly wondering, that draws him to the king; childermass, who has to reconcile his almost feudal devotion to uskglass as king with the bone-deep terror that comes from being his harbinger. also, if you give me childermass/uskglass or segundus/uskglass or both at once as a kind of cathy/heathcliff type thing, with each in love with the other as a representation of the landscape, i will cry with joy.

the magnus archives

characters requested: jonathan sims, elias bouchard, “michael”

one of my absolute favorite things about this past season has been jon slowly becoming less and less human and more and more an avatar of the beholding, this terrified and unwilling vessel for something he doesn’t understand. i’d love to see a dissection of that fear in the context of his relationship with elias, or michael (yes i know he’s “dead” shut up), or both. how does jon feel about elias now— elias who got him into this in the first place, elias who represents the thing that’s slowly leaching away jon’s personhood and filling the space with something totally alien? how does elias feel about what’s happening to jon— how does elias feel about jon, more generally? and michael— does jon ever consider running to him, giving himself to the spiral instead of the beholding? (i’d love a fic where this actually happens, especially if it includes elias’s reaction.) how does michael think of jon, jon the human instead of jon the avatar? (see the lovecraft section above, actually.) what about him merits interest? and jon, how much of his being drawn to michael is a function of curiosity, how much a function of michael’s manipulation, how much the beholding pushing him to learn & experience & experiment? mostly, i just adore the complications of humanity that develop when a person is thrown to the eldritch wolves like jon’s been, and how the pushes & pulls of elias’s influence and michael’s influence act on him. 

(also, i’m not saying i’d love a terrified jon at the center of a weird incomprehensible eldritch love triangle, but i’m not saying i would not want that.)

that’s about it, i think! please feel free to drop by my inbox (on anon ofc, just tell me you’re my writer in the message) and ask if you need any clarification on anything. thank you again! i’m really excited to see what you write! 

[riverstonesims]

House of Pancakes: Writing Prompt #1

The sims discord server I’m on has started doing prompts so this is my attempt. Any feedback would be great, thanks! :)

The prompt is: The mansion was dark and cold and honestly looked like it was about to fall down from neglect. Naturally, we couldn’t wait to get inside.

I’m considering this semi-canon in Giu’s storyline. At this stage, he and Elise are teens. :)

The mansion had stood on the crest of the hill for nigh on a hundred and forty years, with a perfect view of Twinbrook which stretched out below, farmhouses standing guard in fields in the far distance and the Marais River, a dark glistening blue. It had been constructed in a time growth for the town, where coal and cotton had been the main exports, taken along the railway lines for further exportation and usage in the north.

After the storm of ’55 which caused the bayou to flood the lower areas of the town and destroy the most important link the town had to the outer world, business slowed and eventually came to a halt. The town emptied, shops closed and the rich left. The owners of the mansion fled the town to make wealth elsewhere, and ever since it has stood locked, boarded up and abandoned.

Elise had brought up this fact as we’d sat in history class, her foot tapping in time with her pencil. I glanced at her, rolled my eyes and put a finger to my lips. “Sssh.”

Her eyes looked towards the teacher who was muttering in a drone-like voice with his back turned and she knelt over towards me, a wicked grin on her face. “You know what, Giu?”

“Your tapping is annoying?” I replied, trying to catch what our history teacher was saying about the French Revolution all the while trying to focus on what my best friend was saying.

“Very funny. No, something else,” she said quietly, almost teasing me as I tried to pay attention. Her foot crept over the space between our desks and she nudged me a couple of times.

“Surprise me, El,” I whispered back, my eyes finally connecting with hers.

“You know that house on the hill?”

“The old mansion, yeah. Mr Mathewson talked about it when we were doing stuff for Twinbrook’s annual foundation fair, remember. The owners were in charge of the former cotton fields to the west and-”

“Blah, blah history,” Elise shot back, shrugging. “Rumour has it that the owners planned on coming back one day and buried some gold bars in some part of the house. And they never came back. Wanna head up to it and check out the situation?”

“You can’t be serious? As if they’d leave gold bars!” I chuckled softly, my eyes flicking between our teacher at the front and Elise’s face.

“I’m deadly serious. Imagine Iris’ face when we turn up with these bars. It’d shut her up for a while.”

The thought was tempting and I hurriedly looked over my shoulder at the girl in question. Her head was bent as she wrote the notes that were appearing on the board, her long black hair braided perfectly, not a hair out of place. As if she knew I was looking, Iris sat up and looked at me, her grey eyes not blinking until I turned back around.

“Let’s do it.” Elise grinned back at me and gave me a wink. Before she could answer, however, we were interrupted.

“Mr di Forza and Miss Anderson, care to share what you were discussing with the rest of your class?”

Elise was speechless but I was ready. “Oh just how the Bastille prison was a representation of royal authority in Paris and that the storming of it was a flashpoint, you know, for what was to come.”

As Mr Mathewson gave a small nod and turned back around to continue droning on whilst Elise and I exchanged glanced with matching grins. “Meet me at mine at 8 o’clock with a torch.”

Later that evening after stating to my parents that I was going to tutor Elise’s brother in some Maths, I cycled over to Elise’s under the cover of darkness, my feet pumping at the pedals as I got closer to my best friend’s house. She was already waiting outside, a hoodie pulled up over her head, hands in her pockets. The nights were getting colder and she was stamping her feet impatiently.

“Took your time, Giu,” she muttered as I got off my bike.

“Yeah, I’m aiming to be a writer, not an Olympic cyclist, sorry to disappoint,” I shot back, nudging her. “Now come on before we’re caught.”

“My parents are out for the night and Ethan’s got a, what do you call them, a ‘friend’ over, so I was definitely ready to leave the house. I’ve been out here for fifteen minutes.”

“Well, let’s get to it El. Let’s go find this supposed treasure of yours.”

“I’m telling you, I think my hunch on this rumour is right.”

“You said the same thing about the Science Fair and look what happened.”

“Oh ssssh.” The clouds overhead merged together, darkening the sky and hiding the stars that had been twinkling above. The hill ahead loomed as we cycled through Twinbrook, past the rich part of time and past the broken railway tracks. We parked our bikes under the trees and slinked towards the building. The mansion was dark and cold and honestly looked like it was about to fall down from neglect. Naturally, we couldn’t wait to get inside.

“Come on, Giu,” whispered Elise, grabbing my hand and pulling me along. We reached the front door, boarded up heavily though the wood had rotten a lot since the fifties. Looking at it, we decided to try a window and though boarded up, it didn’t take long to pull them off; the sound they made seemed to echo around the hill and down to the houses below. I looked around nervously, beginning to have second thoughts. “Hey, El, I’m not too sure.”

“Oh don’t be such a scaredy cat, Giu. It's going to be alright. No one lives here, it’s been boarded up for like decades. Come on, di Forza.” She shot a grin at me just as the moonlight hit her face and then she was gone, climbing through the wide window. I sighed, feeling a silly grin come on my face before I followed her into the darkness.

As my feet hit the floor I flicked on my torch, following the light coming from Elise’s own as we made our way in what seemed to the living room. A large doorway beckoned from the left and we went through it, coming to wide sweeping stairs which we went up, the stair creaking heavily under our weight, and from not being used in many a year. The stairs seemed to go on forever and I lost count before I bumped into Elise’s back. She’d paused at the top, frozen, torch held out in front.

“Wha-” But I was interrupted. “Ssh. Just sssh. I heard something.”

“What, are you scared?” I teased her, coming up beside her, my hand automatically coming to the small in her back.  “Well, go on, you go first. This was your idea.”

She didn’t move and I followed the beam of her torch. A shuffle came from the darkness, and then another, a third, a fourth, coming closer and closer. I could feel Elise beginning to shake, my hand still in the small of her back. “Let’s go El,” I whispered into her ear. “Let’s come back during the day or another time, maybe with a bigger group.” She squeaked and hastily found my hand, squeezing it tightly.

“Yes, please!” The shuffling go louder and we turned on our heels, right back down the long staircase, to the right and out through the window. I knew we were making a lot of noise but right then it didn’t matter; right then all we wanted to do was get out.

Reaching our bikes, Elise called out softly to me. “How about we head to yours and watch the first Lord of the Rings film again, instead?”

“That sounds like a brilliant idea. Come on, I don't want to be here any longer!” I responded watched as Elise began pedalling away into the nigh. I looked behind as we left and saw a figure in the window and felt a cold shiver go right down to my bones. Nope, we were never coming back again.