the sky, pure opal now

Troubled grown men doing wife shit in my mind palace

just saw a "only one bed" fic with the major character death warning

#i guess that's one way to solve that problem

“This bed ain’t big enough for the both of us.”

The fastest way to accomplish The Project is to cease being afraid of The Project. The Project cannot maim you. The Project cannot kill you. The Project is more afraid of you than you are of it. It is okay if The Project turns out differently from how it was in your head, and it is okay if it has flaws. You are capable of engaging with The Project.

Blackout poetry exists on a dual axis from "banal" to "insightful" on the input side and "kind of deep" to "incredibly fucking dumb" on the output side, and while taking something banal and producing something kind of deep is well and fine, for my money taking something insightful and rendering it incredibly fucking dumb is where the real art is.

you met me at a very unmedicated time in my life

Something nobody prepares you for is that the better you get at writing the harder it becomes. beginners write freely because they don't know enough to know what's wrong. then you learn. and suddenly you can see every single flaw in real time as you're making it and you have to write anyway while your own brain is in the corner going "that's a weak verb. that transition is lazy. you've used that word three times." getting good at this is mostly just getting better at ignoring yourself.

With severance season 2 around the corner it’s time for me to share the time I accidentally watched 4 minutes of an episode on mute and thought it was a brilliant way to show the sensory deprivation experienced by the innies

one of my creative writing professors once said that to evaluate a work as good or not, first you ask what the work is attempting to do, and then you evaluate how well it does it. and this is how to judge everything from critical essays to romance novels to snack packaging to theory tracts.

i understand wanting to coddle your guy after the horrors or whatever but. there is something sooooo compelling about strangers and even friends flinching away from the Character in the aftermath. something’s not the same as it was, and maybe no one can put their finger on it—what draws their focus that never did before, the intensity of their attention, the way they set their jaw, now, and never quite fully relax their body. but it’s unsettling. even if you can’t name it, there’s the suspicion that something in them broke into a sharp edge, and people can sense the threat.