the color of my lover's eyes

LOVE your book btw <3

Of course you can.

This is my favourite matching pair from the book. As a bonus, here's my second favourite.

That last one probably constitutes the loudest argument for posting the full-colour versions more often. I bet a lot of people don't even know they're in colour.

I hesitate to simply call Nene and Sole an "enemies to lovers" dynamic, but asking as someone who adores that general premise, the messier the better, what was the process of writing their evolving relationship like? and how did you decide on the pacing? I would deeply appreciate any tips you have to give there. it's genuinely my favorite depiction of such a fraught evolution since This is How You Lose the Time War.

and re: Malacresta, would I be correct in assuming that a huge portion of his unspoken motivation in the latter portion of the book is, well, "fuck you, stop coddling me"? I get the impression he spends his time in the background wrestling with his neurodivergence the way Sole wrestles with gender—wondering how much of that is by authorial design!

You’re back! I love it when people come back to tell me the book stuck the landing. I had a really rubbish long journey yesterday and what kept me going was the knowledge that I had a question about Malacresta waiting for me at home. Everyone use the established hashtag #malacresta malacheti to post your erotic fantasies about what you’d do if he offered to show you his rock collection.

First, enemies to lovers! I struggle to put Sole and Nene under that banner too, but only because it’s not a plot-driven enemies-to-lovers story. I guess famous enemies-to-lovers stories are often about two people on opposite sides of a conflict who realise they’re very similar, and Sole and Nene are two very different people who have all possible external stuff in common. Same community, same friend group, dead fathers, mothers who misunderstand and fear them. They do have a fundamental internal quality in common, of course, and that’s that lifelong sense of unbelonging in their bodies – Sole a dysphoric trans man, Nene a piece of God stuffed into a human meat suit, written obviously to be the same feeling – but that feeling manifests in each boy in completely opposite emotional and communicational styles, which is where the enmity comes from. Sole’s volcanically angry and also feels positive emotions like love and creative muse as violent extremes (I have a peer with BPD who reads Sole as having BPD, which is canon now as far as I’m concerned), and Nene’s an eerie spin on Meek And Mild who hardly feels emotions at all.

If Sole and Nene’s weird romance works for you, it might be because their personalities aren’t just different, but represent something the other person is deeply, deeply jealous of. When Sole is young, and doesn’t understand his dysphoria yet, Nene’s placidity through pain is the most baffling possible thing – how can this boy shrug at a broken ankle, the death of his mother, the bullying I put him through, and I can’t even put on a dress without crying? And I try not to make definitive statements about what Nene’s thinking, because what Nene’s thinking is the cosmic horror of it all, but his defining moment of surrender before he and Sole kiss for the second time is this:

Nene grinned a fiery, gaping grin. “I love you,” he said, giving me a reeling attack of vertigo, “because you hate me. You feel something deeply and perpetually that I have never felt. The very core of your being is distant and unknowable to me, like a star. I want to eat it out of your mouth.”

All that’s to say: When Sole and Nene ask themselves, “What the fuck is wrong with that guy?” they’re really asking, “What the fuck is wrong with me?”

When I was writing, I found that was the most essential thing about attracting opposites. The romantic tension isn’t between two people’s conflicting traits, but between one person’s conflicting desires about what to do once they’ve ripped that trait out of the other. Crush it under their boot or eat it.

In that spirit, I came to see those scenes in the church crypt as the two of them trying to eat each other. Realising they couldn’t – that Nene would leave without Sole no matter in what form and that Sole would never stop hating his body – and eating themselves instead. A million points of contact and none of attachment. That’s the pacing advice I’d give you: You’ve got to give them time and space to get totally lost in each other. Tie the tent shut, bring the walls down on the trapdoor. Whatever logic should get them discovered doesn’t matter as much as showing us what they do undiscovered. I wrote it that way because I’d had enough of reading about wonderful insular character-driven love stories climaxing with jealous exes or secret underground organisations. They’ll ruin themselves just fine if you let them.

Anyway, time for real character talk.

I’m just kidding, but every time I get to talk about Malacresta I feel like one of those massive flaming stone block title cards has just fallen behind me. I say it all the time, but Malacresta was 100% improvised during the first draft, and I consider how perfectly he slotted into all the holes in the story to be kind of a holy miracle. And yeah, “Fuck you, stop coddling me” is exactly it. I opened my enemies-to-lovers ramble by mentioning the kind of enmity where you’re psychological kindred spirits but ideological opposites, and whilst Sole and Nene aren’t that, Sole and Prasede absolutely are. Malacresta’s arc is about being stuck between those two identical enemies - both his close friends because they're dominant straight shooters who balance his timidness, now fighting for control of him. Malacresta embodies that introverted, sensory-seeking, hyperfixated autistic stereotype which stirs that “Smol-bean-must-be-protected-at-all-costs” instinct in annoying neurotypical people, and when Sole put him to work in the furnace, as much as she’s the moral core of the novel, Prasede became that person. She misinterpreted Malacresta’s autistic traits as a lack of intelligence and didn’t think he was capable, yes, but she also misinterpreted his hyperfixation as unhealthy obsession and wanted to ‘rescue’ him from the work he was happily engaging in. I will now post in its entirety my favourite crashout in Crashout: The Novel:

“You’re just like Prasede!” Malacresta yells. “Do you know what she used to say to me when I was making the green and purple? ‘Look at me, Mal, look at me.’ I’ve never looked at people when I talk to them! I’d read my own wedding vows to the floor! You made me feel like you gave a shit about the windows, like you’d picked me because I was best for it, like for the first time in my life I could be useful, and all you were doing was… babysitting me like everyone else! There’s no Malacresta in Malacresta’s eyes—” I get up to run, and he chases me, rebounds the blade off the table so hard it completes the reverse of its arc. “You want to see me, you look at the things I make for you!”

In Malacresta, I wanted to explore those times where the lovely, “I love you for who you are, not what you make” turns into the thoroughly nasty, “I can love who you are without loving what you make.” Toward the end of their time in the church, you see how badly Malacresta wants to impress Prasede with his glassmaking. He runs to fetch her whenever he makes a breakthrough, he draws a portrait of her in the drawing lesson and wants to turn her into his first ever glass picture. And she just doesn’t want it. She thinks she’s looking through it, but in looking through it, she’s looking through him too.

With that said, I have deep sympathy for Prasede. When I’m writing villain stories, I like to style a side character as the plucky protagonist of the alternate trail-of-clues horror story, and Prasede’s that girl. We know she was the last person besides Sole to be kind to Nene before his death, so her fear of leaving Sole alone with introverted autistic boys has a very large, bloody, many-eyed precedent.

But yeah. Stop coddling him! Prasede wanted Malacresta on a pedestal away from the distress of work and Sole wanted him to create until it killed him. What’s important is that they both thought he was too weak and stupid to decide for himself, and Sole only learned better after he beat him almost to death in a fight and then Machiavelli’d him into a public humiliation ritual. What happens to Malacresta at the end isn’t a cautionary tale against unhealthy artistic obsession; it’s too cold for holes in my glass house. It’s about the oppression of his neurodivergence, and how dangerous he became when he was let loose after a lifetime of it.

Long post, eh? My bad. They were good questions.

WIP (Cassius) of a fanart I'm doing of The Teras Threat trilogy books. These books are soo good. I initially started reading it cause of the promise of queer naughty Bloodborneish universe, but it's so much more than that. The plot is so well planned and everything falls neatly together at the end. It's a satisfying payoff.

And the characters 😭 oh my god, the protag, Cassius, is so human and so flawed and charismatic! He is so lovable it hurts. All the other characters are amazing too!! Most of the characters in these books will steal your heart and break it :') it's awesome.

A full meal for anyone who lived through religious trauma 😌 and if you liked Bloodborne, you gonna love it too.