#unless they're posting about specific real living/lived human beings in harmful ways

[8lah8lah]

"both sides of shipcourse are wrong" says person about to not bat a fucking eye when someone on one side gets chased off the fucking internet and doxxed and told they deserve assault for liking ships that are abusive in a way they dont immediately understand/relate to. "shipping discourse is just sooo dumb and immature" says person about to fucking gasp and scream and tell all their mutuals and post "STOP putting ***** on my dash in 202_" vagues like A Gross Drawing Existing In The World is going to singlehandedly groom and traumatize and enable and Normalize everything for everyone on the planet simultaneously for simply being put out there and it being out there is a category 10000 mental safety hazard that they must bravely defend people from. "youre stupid if you care about ship discourse lmao" posts brave tumblr user about to get really upset publically over One person they saw shipping a like, 4-year age gap between two fictional chars that's there if you Squint, an opinion that Clearly has NOTHING to do with very specifically one side of the discourse

[rataltouille]

GEOMETRY OF THE HOLY MOON (1 AM): A SHORT STORY

GENRE: surrealism, literary fiction.

POV & TENSE: this little space is not enough for how wild the form is so i talk about this later!!

SETTING: a small desi village, 1924-25.

TONE: dreamy, unsettling, melancholic.

THEMES: faith vs reality, how people perceive others and how they perceive themselves, grief dealt the wrong way.

AESTHETICS: the splash of water on a quiet night, thick clouds obscuring the sky, rippling the moon’s reflection on the water. the intensity of a garden in spring, the emptiness of a dying town, the suffocation from being singled out. hands grazing lightly but never fully held. a lingering sadness behind your laugh. believing in things you shouldn't believe in. putting faith on a starless sky.

STAGE: completed first draft, 4085 words.

LOGLINE: a young boy, surrounded by loss, claims to talk to god. the story follows him and his conversations with this god, all while his village spies on him as he weaves his way around the two most crucial and lonely years of his life.

LITERAL LOGLINE: on today’s news let’s talk about a small backward town that hates sad little boys who worship god, even though the place is lowkey a cult!!

CHARACTERS:

THE SUMMER BOY: he’s around thirteen, and he’s very emotionally attached to his past. he lost his family at a young age to an unstable force, so he spends his time talking to himself. he’s a quiet, demure and sweet person, always willing to help others. he’s outwardly oblivious and sees only the good in people to a point where he doesn't understand when they’re trying to do him wrong. but! considering how the story [like a lot of my others] has themes of perception vs reality, it needs to be said that he isn't all that innocent. he’s rather impulsive and rash, never afraid of hurting himself [and thus accidentally harming others].

A GOD: is he real? do we even know if he’s an actual god? a very elusive figure despite having a lot of screentime. he’s a surprisingly humanised character and arguably the one with the most empathy. he has a soft spot for the boy and the two have a deep bond which is not common for a human and a god to have. you don’t get insight to what the other gods are like, but they’re implied to exist. this story has a very messy and hazy view towards religion and godhood and their nature towards humanity, and this vague figure, a dreamlike character, is proof enough of that.

THE VILLAGE: okay so in general these people suck. the village consists of, well, the village, but they’re very fluid in the way they appear in the story? as in for the most part they appear as a collective, a unit. one character, the summer boy’s “friend”, is somewhat separate considering he’s a pretty important character. it’s very hard describing this unit of a character but essentially they’re the main antagonistic force and they hate the protagonist for seemingly no reason.

WHAT GOES DOWN:

sometime around this time, the boy chances upon meeting his “god”, this being who lives up in the clouds and whom he talks with often, except you don't know if this god is real or not. that’s one of the recurring themes of this story: what’s real and what isn’t. it’s :) a fun time :) for sure :)

essentially Things Happen And It Only Gets Weirder. i cannot even try describing what happens because it’s all very spoilery but let’s just say that this is a very sad story but not even in a “this makes me cry” manner, but rather in a “this is so fucked up wtf why”. the prose of this is very, very hazy and thick, in a manner that’s both smooth and suffocating. there’s also a lot of moon and water imagery which we love. i love the atmosphere + the setting—colonial india— as it’s a subtle but key element to the plot.

FORM:

OKAY YES be prepared for the true colours of how unhinged i am. i apologize for the form brainrot.

POV: so in this story i really said “what if it had all three of the main povs... jk jk... unless 😳😳” and then proceeded to use all three povs. you’re probably wondering, how did i do that? WHY did i do that? and my answer to that is: 🙂

the first-person pov: the summer boy narrates in first person. his pov takes up about 40% of the story, and this is where we unlock family backstory + how he feels about the various forces playing into his life. he’s an extremely unreliable narrator and he knows it; his narration oscillates between very naive and very self-aware, and this effect is pretty disconcerting. the summer boy is kind of a walking contradiction and we love that conflict.

the second-person pov: a god narrates in second person. his pov takes around 20% of the story, and his scenes all involve his conversations with the boy. his pov is extremely detached, and suspends belief because he seems awfully made up. there’s an edge to the prose in his narration, where you know that something's off, but you can’t exactly pinpoint what.

the third-person pov: the villagers narrate, either as a collective, or as an individual figure, in third person. they take up the other 40% of the story, and there are so many different people and differing opinions with this, and every time we read a third person excerpt it’s a different person, and this is mostly used to add onto the different ways in which the boy is perceived. this is also where the structural part of the form gets really wacky.

STRUCTURE: if my story isn't told in vignettes is it my story though /j. gothm is told in vignettes, each one between 50 to 500 words. the first and second person bits are normal-ish vignettes, with straightforward narration. the third person vignettes, on the other hand, are super assorted. we have a lot of epistolaric sections— there’s a letter, a folk song [which was found around the summer boy], and most of the conversation is told as just plain dialogue without tags. there’s also a phone call transcript, and finally some normal chunks of prose. what am i doing wtf.

also to add onto this the story is told non-linearly. 😀 the only thing that keeps me from going insane is the fact that there are chronological tags before most vignettes [also the manner in which they're tagged differs from pov to pov. for example a few of the third person conversations are marked just as “sunday” or “thursday”, while the summer boy’s narration is marked with the full date and year]

in all this clownery i completely forgot to mention what the tense was [the way everything else was so complicated that i forgot tense was a thing lmao] and good news!! it’s the only sane thing about this story!! it’s told fully in present tense. thank everything.

AN EXCERPT:

okay i’m once again not sharing much because this will be submitted to litmags 🧞

[The boy is scrawny as always. He carries an air of diswant— even death had rejected him when the plague killed only his grandmother— but walks like he doesn’t notice. He smiles at them, jitters, and wipes his hand across his knees. Blood comes away in thin, translucent lines. He saves it on the kerchief he keeps tucked in his shirt, careful to dirty the cloth even more. The villagers scrunch their noses in disgust; who knew how old and rotten the kerchief was, or how long it had carried blood like the unwashed sword of a warrior?]

also by the way this excerpt is in square brackets because it is a third-person interjection in a vignette that is otherwise first-person [at this point...]

SPARE THOUGHTS:

this was inspired by a conversation i had with my grandfather, where he was telling me about how people used to sing songs to the skies, as a way of devotion to a specific god. he used the [loose translation of] the english word “yearning” to refer to the emotion the singers would invoke, and that sparked the concept of a disillusioned young boy who talks to the moon as a way to please the god he’s in love with. it’s a very softly disconcerting story and once again deals with the theme of “perception vs reality” which if you know me and my work, is the theme i’m forever obsessed with.

i really like how this turned out? the atmosphere is exactly how i wanted it to be, and there’s so much i have to add on as i edit and i’m really looking forward to that. this is also the only short story i’ve written where i knew which litmag i’d love for it to be published in? like i never write things with publishing in mind, but for some reason while writing this story it occurred to me that it would be a perfect fit for this specific magazine and i love that. anyway if you’ve made it through the post till here,,,, bless you and your braincells. and that’s all for today!!

[oramn]

Washington Post Book Ban Podcast Episode

The Washington Post did an episode on book banning in rural farm towns in north western NJ. I go to school at one of the schools mentioned in the episode where attempted book banings happened. Thankfully, in my district, nothing happened because of our librarians (i seriously love them so much) but it was terrifying watching as a queer, transgender student

If you haven't listened to it, there is one woman, carol, who was a law student and believed that providing these books to minors was illegal and said it was grooming (when asked) she is for parental rights. The hosts did a good job bringing up how this was following an old harmful stereotype that queer people are sexually manipulative towards children, and they also brought up how the students at these higschools were arguing to keep these books because there were far more explicit sex scenes with straight couples and that the only reason they were complained against was because it was about queer sex or mentions of queer sexuality.

And Carol says that the kids turned it into an LGBTQ thing and not a parental rights thing. The thing is, this is terrifying, that this woman is claiming that the only reason she wants these books out of the library was because it was sexual, even when there are more books with more sexual content in the library. She and the parental rights groups were targeting Queer books under the guise of protecting children, and I don't think people understand how scary that is.

Not only does it sexualize queer bodies and being queer in general, it also neglects the fact that humans have sex. Teenagers have sex. I remember being 14 at field hockey practice hearing about this pair of twins (who are my age and I have known since I was 7) having sex with the same girl at a party where alcohol was involved, I have a story of my friends who were dating at the time buying lube at Spencers, I have a story of how my friend's mom found out they were dating their (now ex) partner because she saw a hickey on their stomach, I have a story of how my dad racked up hundreds of dollars from calling numbers that have explicit materials(idk the terms) in the 80s.

Taking sexual content out of the library neglects that teenagers are human and have sex and make stupid decisions under the guise of "protecting children" when some of these children are nearly adults. It's religious based as well, the first meeting, people were saying amen, there was a woman who was pro-book banning running for BOE and she was an insane trumpy-christian and violently homophobic.

This rhetoric is terrifying because these campaigns to protect children are designed to make those who have no opinion angry, it's designed to gain traction and make people upset over something that is not an issue.

Like recently at hunterdon central, some students put together a drag show and invited teachers because if it were open doors it was going to be a shit show because people are assholes. It was in no way sexual however due to how some straight people sexualize queerness people freaked out. Specifically the twt user libs of tiktok blew it out of proportion and was implying the super intendant was allowing those teachers who saw it was a bad thing because drag is inherently sexual in their eyes. I remember my friend, the son of the superintendent coming into lunch and saying how they had to file a police report because of how out of control it got.

This is terrifying and the fact that homophobia is so easy to latch onto because it's packaged into "protecting children." People will never be openly homophobic unless they're crazy, so using protecting children as a front, intentionally or not, is horrifying as a queer teenager. Because it's sheltering kids from the real world and potentially ending the lives of many queer and trans students because of the "protection".