#that's the tag now. i'm going to be religiously cataloguing this

[necirusalka]

renovating teshin’s side of the room is going to take even longer than i expected because i’ve tentatively decided i want to give him more fucking floor

it turns out that flipping the zariman benches upside-down and stacking them actually makes extremely good curved shelving!

it just looks utterly bizarre from the other side

[goodluckclove]

Tag Game - Questions for Fellow Writers!

I was tagged by the talented @mushroommanchanterelle but I'm going to be a dingus about this, just you wait.

Last book I read: I'm reading an encyclopedia about birds that I got from a used bookstore because it's little and cute and I wanted it to get inspiration for Edgar in Songbird Elegies. I'm also reading The Dead Beat, which is a book about obituary writers. It's pretty good!

Greatest literary inspiration: I definitely get a lot of Vonnegut and maybe Hemingway in terms of accessibility in prose? One of the most important things to me in what I write is making sure that language is beautiful, but simple enough to be easily understood. I think the highest praise I've gotten is from non-native English speakers like my beloved compatriot @ivaspinoza who still really enjoy the excerpts I post.

Maybe also Palahinuik with some of the content and narrative gimmicks? Lil' bit of Kerouac, but like before On the Road? Does that sound like anything?

Things in my current fandom(s) I want to read but I don't want to write: My greatest shame of mine is that I don't really actually have a fandom. I don't like to admit that because it makes me sound like some hermit who only fixates on their writing, but that's...not entirely inaccurate. I consume a lot of media, but nothing that I'd consider myself part of the fandom of.

But I still want to be included because my friend Mushy wants to include me, so I'm making up a fandom. It's a TV show called Jonathan's Food Truck, staring Don Cheadle as Jonathan Fudtruk, a man with aspirations to start a food truck.

I really want to read an AU of Jonathan's Food Truck where he has to sell the food truck. What would happen? Where would he go? Imagine the outage. He fucks that food truck. I'm a Jonathan/Food Truck pro-shipper.

Things in my current fandom(s) I want to write but I think nobody would be interested in them but me: a whump fic where Jonathan is forced to operate a brick and mortar restaurant and also he can't stop pissing himself.

You can recognize my writing by: Apparently elaborate food descriptions. I think my dialogue is pretty distinct from what I've been told. Kind of experimental and not super literary. I don't really know how to answer this, maybe you guys can tell me.

My most controversial take (current fandom[s]): The analog horror ARG for Jonathan's Food Truck was not as bad as people say it was. And since it came out before The Mandela Catalogue, they're actually the originators of religious trauma in modern online horror.

Top three favourite tropes: Pathetic characters, abstract narratives, radical softness

What’s your current writing mood? (10 – super motivated and churning out words like crazy, 0 – in a complete rut) I mean it's mildly annoying to me but I'm deciding to put aside Book Two for like a week or so and re-edit Book One for a final run before I consider it fully ready to publish. But I'm down for that so - 10?

Share a random frustration: Itch on foot. I don't have one right now but I don't like when I do.

I tag @mercuryytheraven and @rkmoon and @ratracewriting, and I highly encourage you all to make up a fandom like I did because it's a very funny additional challenge.

[scurvgirl]

Weekly Tag Wednesday! (is that the order? I can never remember)

Ah! I missed the last few, I'm so sorry! Thank you to all who have tagged before and this time <3 @mybrainismelted @energievie @michellemisfit

Hello Wednesday friends! I hope you don't mind but I decided to be CrEaTiVe and try something different today. I hope it's okay!! 🚑💨 Get in bitch, we're going on a mystical adventure through space, time, and reality. (in ian and mickey's ambulance of course) ✨ Name: Scurv (y'all, I am so tired, I almost wrote my government name)

Zodiac Sign: Taurus

Personality type in enneagram, myers-briggs, or both: I think my Meyers-Briggs' is INFP but not to get all psych degree but it's actually hella unreliable and not accurate and -

Before we hit the road, what snack are you gonna bring for our trip? Peanut M&M's and Jalapeno Chips

Navigator gets to pick the music so what song are you turning on? Telephone by Lady Gaga ft. Beyonce

What is a universe from a fantasy tv show you would like to visit? Avatar: The Last Airbender! I wanna be a bender (a water bender!)

And what about a fantasy movie? Howl's Moving Castle. I almost said LOTR but to actually be in...I think the magic aspects of Howl's Moving Castle fits my vibe better overall

Okay, how about a scifi tv show? Oh man, I don't watch many scifi TV shows, hmm....I really don't know, maybe Star Trek but I never really watched it!

And a scifi movie universe? I guess Star Wars, I think it'd be cool to see Coruscant

Any other tv show or movie universes you'd like to swing by before we move on? Fuck it, let's go to the Shire and get blazed

Okay hold on to your butts we're switching gears to fanfic universes. Tell me which fanfic universe we're visiting first? Like by an author? I don't really follow anyone religiously in the Shameless fandom and I skew towards more realistic AU's if that makes sense? Now if we are talking about ALL of my fandoms, I am sending myself to the LG Frat AU I made YEARS ago with friends in the Dragon Age fandom that to this day remains one of the coolest fan things I've ever contributed to.

Cool, do you have one more you'd like to stop at before we head home? Can I choose one I made? Because I'd also like to visit my House Witch AU I made for Dragon Age OC's. Still proud of that as well. (to my Shameless folks, I originate in the DA fandom here, so most of my catalogue is gonna be from there)

Alright, on our way out of fanfic land you get to snag some tropes to bring home and apply to your own life, think fast! soulmates or enemies to lovers // coffee shop or flower shop // fake relationship or slow burn // amnesia or time loop (neither lol) // body swap or miscommunication // love triangle or arranged marriage // sharing a bed or drunken confession (BOTH)

Wow okay, hope those tropes work out for you!! Our adventure has finally come to an end, where in the world am I dropping you off? Georgia, USA

tagging @lupeloto @golden28s @jademickian um...I am so sorry you guys, I am so tired I can't think of anymore off the top of my head - if you see this, I tagged you!!! <3

[thewhumperinwhite]

WKW: The Rose Queen, Part 2

WKW Masterlist / The Rose Queen Part 1

alternate title: [insert power man] you in danger girl

like i said i dont remember who my taglist was and i think a bunch of those people are inactive now so i'm just going through my activity on other wkw posts i'm so sorry anyway uh @whumpitywhumpwhump @buggy-about-town @the-monarch-whumperfly @whump-cravings (also yk please message me if you wanna be tagged in wkw stuff)

TW for: implied/referenced child abuse/neglect; (graphically) referenced whipping; Mild Ritual Self-Harm (cutting palm); Fantasy Religious Themes

----

She should know better by now, she should. But when the news comes that some shadowy invader from the North has besieged the Castle at Colomur and means to take the Lion’s head, Cinth really believes that her grandfather will rise in his King’s defense.

The Rose Count has been one of the royal family’s most important political allies for seven generations, almost as long as the Horned Lady herself. Cinth takes it as a given that the count must marshal his forces against the invaders—he must. He has tied himself to Fourshield house by decades of service and by blood, too—Cinth’s mother may have left the Court at Colomur, and have dragged Cinth away along with her, but she is still the Lion’s wife, and the Lion’s sons have Rose blood in their veins as surely as Cinth does herself.. Cinth knows there is no love in the old man’s heart for anything more complex than the silks and feathers of his own Court, but surely it must be politically expedient to—surely—

“The Rose Court has weathered many of the Lion’s wars,” he tells her while she stands before him in his study, her face hot and palms cold with horror. “We shall weather this, as well.”

About the House, he may even be correct. That remains to be seen.

About himself, at least, he is wrong.

By the time she leaves her grandfather’s study that evening—the second evening of the Seige of Colomur, twenty days before its fall—it is late and her voice is hoarse from an hour of reasoning, twenty minutes of shouting, and another fifteen of begging. She thinks, very briefly, of running to her mother’s chambers, next. Of waking her mother with tears, of crawling into her lap like a child and begging her too, of wasting the rest of the night pleading with Lilianne of Rose to raise one single bejeweled finger to save her sons from death and torture.

However, Cinth has bashed her head against that particular wall before. And, truthfully, she has never had her brother’s stomach for punishment.

She goes to the library, instead. She reads for three days. She picks at the sweetmeats and fruit the servants bring her, thinking of siege rations. Starving herself will not give Andry extra food; she resists the temptation.

The seat of House Rose is an elegant and sprawling manor, not a Castle like the fortress at Colomur. It is an edifice of plaster scrollwork and elaborate frescoes and about a thousand doors, and it is much easier to leave without being seen. Slightly harder to pilfer the fine stuff she needs from the kitchens, but all it takes is a single raised eyebrow to convince the scullery maid who spots her to let her leave with the meat and wine, and a gold coin to ensure her silence about it afterward.

There are a dozen illuminated volumes about the Faefolk in House Rose’s library, and they are almost all glorious histories of the Horned Lady and her generous patronage of Fourshield house. (Cinth tucks one of these into her bag, just in case.) Of the few remaining books and scrolls, one is transparent propaganda from the north about the dangers of the unbound faery and how to kill one, one is an exhaustive catalogue of every minor house in the kingdom and its Patron; and one—Lady-Be-Blessed—actually contains some actionable fucking information.

At sundown on the fourth day of the Siege of Colomur, Cinth rides out through the Rose Trellis’s extravagant manicured gardens and keeps going, through the surrounding town and past the vineyards and farms, into the forest beyond. She brings her rapier, more for a sense of security than anything else; it might deter a wolf if wielded cleverly but no amount of skill will make a rapier any good against a wild boar or a bear.

Cinth does not gamble often. She is gambling a little, now. That the rumors she has heard about this place are true, and that something lives here stronger than a wolf, fiercer even than a boar. And that the book she found in the manor’s library, a unadorned linen-bound volume, many decades old and rarely read if she had to guess, has any truth on its pages at all.

By the time she has finished assembling her little makeshift altar, the only light is the occasional firefly, and the candle she sets on top and lights with a flint from her grandfather’s tinderbox. She sits back on her heels, sweaty and out of breath from hauling stones around for what feels like hours.

One does not summon a Faery, according to the book, and attempting to do so will only cause insult. However, the un-patroned man (or woman, Cinth assumes, though of course the text does not say so) might—entice one, with a little effort.

She doesn’t know if its true. She has not prayed to the Lady since she left Colomur Castle, and does not do so now—her prayer, if so it may be called, is directed at no one in particular.

Lady Hyacinth of Rose is a highborn lady, three steps removed from royalty; she is accustomed, also, to being ignored. She will not be ignored tonight.

Cinth raises her palm above the meat and wine she has arranged on the altar. This isn’t in the book. She thinks, though, of the way the blood poured from her brother’s back the day the Lady claimed him, how it soaked through his once-fine trousers and puddled on the packed earth under the pillory. She draws her sword, wraps her fist around it. Slices through her palm, once, clean and deep.

“Hear me,” she says, fiercely, into the candle’s flame. “No one else with any power will. But if you will hear me, whoever you are, and you have power—give it to me. Give me your power, and I swear, on the Lion’s Head, on my own: I will make your name heard from here to the depths of the Leisevan Wastes.” She squeezes her fist once, brutally; blood splatters over the lamb and wine upon the altar. “And if it means anything,” Cinth says through bared teeth, “I promise you a great deal more blood than this.”

As she says this, a drop of blood lands squarely on the candles wick, extinguishing it with a hiss. Cinth swears at the sudden darkness, and her hand opens automatically.

In the blackness, Cinth feels another hand take hers.

“I think we can work something out,” a voice says in her ear.

[antoine-roquentin]

The Victorian era is infamous, rightly or wrongly, for its repression of sexuality. But its temporal and philosophical heir definitely did repress the possibility of the homoromantic relationships between women and between men that had been normal, if not the norm, for centuries and centuries. This process was rooted in one of society's most fundamental adopted divisions, gender, so you can imagine that there are a whole lot of factors implicated in the shift that are all tangled around each other and mutually reinforcing. Some of the key ones include: industrialization and urbanization, women's colleges, class concerns, a crisis in masculinity (masculinity is always in crisis), and most importantly, the invention of "sexology" as a field of science at a time that science played a central role in cataloguing and normatively ordering society.

Anthony Rotundo, primarily studying men, argues that "romantic friendships" in America start to become visible in the Revolutionary War era and flourish in the mid-19th century. The 18th century is kind of a black hole for me so I'll take his word for when the concept of romantic friendships was jump-started, but it was by no means new. In the Middle Ages, Christians and Muslims alike wrote poetry and composed letters depicting homoromantic and even homoerotic relationships. I'm going back this far not for the heck of it, but because medieval society helps clarify key qualities of male and female "romantic friendships" that contributed to their eventual demise: a societal value on men expressing emotion (knightly tears; religious devotions) and the very, very limited possibilities for unmarried women to rise above the poorest classes. Romantic friendships did not threaten men's sense of themselves as men, patriarchal control of women, or marriage.

Socio-economic changes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries knocked all of that askew.

The 1870s-1920s saw a massive influx of young women and men into U.S. cities. On one hand, this was an age-old process that, for centuries, was basically the season cities could exist (they were population sinks--on their own, city residents could not reproduce enough to replace themselves given mortality rates). On the other, the type of work they found and the pathways for success in that work were much more recent. The old system of apprenticeships and family connections for men, and almost exclusively domestic servant work for women, absolutely persisted but were swamped by the numbers of factory workers and non-domestic service workers. To support the population boom, cities constructed residential hotels/dormitories/apartments that were often designated single-sex.

That situation made both male and female romantic friendships a threat to the gendered prescriptions of society. For men, it diminished the utility of romantic friendships as potential economic and social connections, meaning they wouldn't be stepping stones towards supporting their eventual family. For women, it opened a much more achievable possibility of financial stability outside marriage.

The blossoming of women's colleges at this time made that problem even clearer to the sexuality reformers and sexologists we'll meet in a little--because "these women" were most assuredly middle and upper-middle class. In short: the ideal marriage partners for men...in an environment where romantic friendships could permit them both prestigious social roles (scholars, administrators, politicians, professional artists, etc) and economic success without men. This was true, even long-term, for both students and teachers. About 10% of American women at the end of the 19th century never married; the figure was around 50% for graduates of women's colleges. So when men observed, as in this letter to the Yale student newspaper:

There is a term in general use at Vassar, truly calculated to awaken within the ima penetralia of our souls all that love for the noble and the aesthetic of which our natures are capable, The term in question is "smashing."

When a Vassar girl takes a shine to another, she straightway enters upon a regular course of bouquet sendings, interspersed with tinted notes, mysterious packages of ‘Ridley’s Mixed Candies,’ locks of hair perhaps, and many other tender tokens, until at last the object of her attentions is captured, the two women become inseparable, and the aggressor is considered by her circle of acquaintances as "smashed."

they might not have seen sexual competition, but the possibility of a lifestyle threat was lurking.

Men's romantic friendships were also under fire with respect to their emotionality. The gradual militarization of western culture over the 19th century (think the Salvation Army or the military trappings of the Boy Scouts) drove/was driven by a narrowing definition of masculinity on "muscles"--vigor, strength, athleticism, the Teddy Roosevelt stereotype. Whereas emotions had once been the healthy counterpart, gradually the internal dimensions of character and a value on openness and gentleness became a liability. (Marriage was still okay, because the idealized marriage was the husband/father rising up to 'be a man' and take care of his family).

Steeped in all these burgeoning developments and their implications came the sexologists, with an agenda not just to categorize society but to evangelize their "discoveries."

A lot of us are at least in passing familiar with the "homosexuality didn't exist as 'homosexuality', an identity, before 1900" trope. This can be taken too far (and often is), but it is nevertheless true that the later decades of the 19th century and early 20th century saw professional, middle-class scientists coalescing ideas of same-sex sexual relations according to Science rather than morality. Instead of a wrong step by step choice, it was an abnormal physical, inherited trait.

This idea got mixed up in Progressive Era utopian visions of societal improvement that, among other things, tagged "deviants" and lower-class people as hindering forward progress--just as same-sex sex, now identified with the people who practiced it, prevented heterosexual, reproductive sex.

And scientists like Bernard Talmey exhibited one of my favorite characteristics of historical men writing about women: in his 1904 book on, well, women, he announced his deep concern that the American public "does not even surmise of the existence" of sex between women. It was a scientific version of what I see in my medieval (male) clerics skating gingerly around actually mentioning lesbian activity because they don't want to put the idea in women's minds.

But this view of American sexologists, lagging somewhat behind their European counterparts, was crucial to the decline of romantic friendships among men and women. First, because it started off with a condemnation of these friendships that took away from social order regardless of whether there was sexual activity involved.

Second, because of the label first stacked onto the participants: inverts. That is, the inversion of proper sex/sexual order. Here we meet up with the rise of muscular masculinity against emotionality and gentleness, as well women's political activity and independent economic power against the norm of a separate women's/domestic sphere.

And so romantic friendships, instead of a natural part of growing up for men and women, became an aberration--not in the sense of "rare", but in the sense of "wrong."

...Unbeknownst to the sexologists, however, their codification of language and an identity for homosexual men and women gave people who did experience same-sex attraction a mutual self-understanding--a certain legitimacy. It's seen as the beginning of an LGBTQ+ movement (if not yet a civil rights one). So there is a lot to mourn about the loss of romantic friendships and what it signified. But this is one story about the past that also has a future.

Further Reading:

This is actually a topic where there are some books that hit the triumvirate of happiness: generally good historically, interesting to read, and affordable on Amazon. I'd recommend:

Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States

Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th Century America (this is older, now, and I have some problems with how it handles race and class, but it's well grounded in its sources, and both educational and entertaining)

Scott Herring, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Gay and Lesbian History

So that's where I'd start. :)