(the faint chattering of the songs that are to come)
Sunny. 41. Author of many stories, short and long - novella Your Shadow Half Remains is now available from Tor Nightfire. Creator of the Gone podcast. Fanfic-wise, author of many stories in fandoms that include The Walking Dead, Dishonored, and Harsh Realm, among other stuff. Non-binary: they/them.
author site | bluesky | gone | my fic | howl: a guide | keep singing: a bethyl podcast | fic books | buy me a coffee
Update, for anyone stil paying attention to this (mostly because of The Good Stars)
I’m not dead
The Good Stars is not dead
To elaborate: Last summer I started writing something new, in a fandom for which I am essentially the only active member as far as I can discern. It hit at a very particular time and quickly took over my entire creative brain, and for a variety of reasons I’ve essentially shelved everything else until it’s done.
To elaborate further: For a little while I was trying to write a weird kinda essay series about it, explaining what it was and why I was doing it, and I’ve given that up for the moment. Maybe at some point I’ll try to continue it. Suffice to say that… You remember I’ll Be Yours For a Song? You remember how it completely took over my brain for half a year and ended up being one of the most personally significant and meaningful things I’ve ever written?
Yeah, so that’s basically happened again, only this time I’m writing it for no one except me, which is something I have never done before.
It’s over 250k words long and I’m still not finished with it, although I think I’ve crested the peak and now I’m on the slope down.
I’ve posted some of it, but I stopped because I realized I wanted it to be done first. Although I’ve been back and forth on it a bit, I do intend to post all of it once it’s finished, for anyone who cares to look at it. But it’s only for me. In some strange ways it’s a spiritual companion to IBYFAS, almost a sister story. It’s about love and guilt and pain and growth and death, and living with a broken body and mind, and finding meaning and joy in a broken world, and art and truth and how we become who we’re supposed to become in spite of everything. In some ways it’s most fundamentally a very long conversation with myself about everything that matters to me at this point. It’s also a story about two soldiers in love who decide—or don’t, because they have no choice—to do one of the most difficult things they’ve ever done in order to find out what they can be.
(This is all set in a very mediocre and swiftly canceled and largely forgotten Chris Carter TV series because my brain is beyond perverse)
It feels very important to me that I finish it and see how it comes out before I give my brain back over to other things—first in line being—yes—The Good Stars.
So yeah: Still here, still working. I’m just working in a way I never really have before, which is certainly an interesting experience. Hopefully I’ll get back to other stuff soon. Thanks very much if you’re still sticking with my other work in spite of the long silence and I hope you’re doing okay despite the world being on fire.
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Will Howl ever be completed? Or are there no plans to come back to that story?
I would honestly love to finish Howl, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it, but unfortunately it’s not first in line for stuff I want to tackle, and while I can often juggle more than one WIP, there’s obviously a limit to how many balls I can keep in the air (plus I still allegedly have a professional writing career). At this point it’s also been so long since I worked on it that I’d need to go back and reread the whole thing from the beginning to even have a solid sense of what the fuck I was doing with it.
I do miss working on it, though! It was tremendous fun, and it’s really gratifying to see that it hasn’t been forgotten and that people are still discovering and enjoying it. So thanks for asking, I mean that.
Update, for anyone stil paying attention to this (mostly because of The Good Stars)
I’m not dead
The Good Stars is not dead
To elaborate: Last summer I started writing something new, in a fandom for which I am essentially the only active member as far as I can discern. It hit at a very particular time and quickly took over my entire creative brain, and for a variety of reasons I’ve essentially shelved everything else until it’s done.
To elaborate further: For a little while I was trying to write a weird kinda essay series about it, explaining what it was and why I was doing it, and I’ve given that up for the moment. Maybe at some point I’ll try to continue it. Suffice to say that… You remember I’ll Be Yours For a Song? You remember how it completely took over my brain for half a year and ended up being one of the most personally significant and meaningful things I’ve ever written?
Yeah, so that’s basically happened again, only this time I’m writing it for no one except me, which is something I have never done before.
It’s over 250k words long and I’m still not finished with it, although I think I’ve crested the peak and now I’m on the slope down.
I’ve posted some of it, but I stopped because I realized I wanted it to be done first. Although I’ve been back and forth on it a bit, I do intend to post all of it once it’s finished, for anyone who cares to look at it. But it’s only for me. In some strange ways it’s a spiritual companion to IBYFAS, almost a sister story. It’s about love and guilt and pain and growth and death, and living with a broken body and mind, and finding meaning and joy in a broken world, and art and truth and how we become who we’re supposed to become in spite of everything. In some ways it’s most fundamentally a very long conversation with myself about everything that matters to me at this point. It’s also a story about two soldiers in love who decide—or don’t, because they have no choice—to do one of the most difficult things they’ve ever done in order to find out what they can be.
(This is all set in a very mediocre and swiftly canceled and largely forgotten Chris Carter TV series because my brain is beyond perverse)
It feels very important to me that I finish it and see how it comes out before I give my brain back over to other things—first in line being—yes—The Good Stars.
So yeah: Still here, still working. I’m just working in a way I never really have before, which is certainly an interesting experience. Hopefully I’ll get back to other stuff soon. Thanks very much if you’re still sticking with my other work in spite of the long silence and I hope you’re doing okay despite the world being on fire.
I didn’t realize until tonight that it’s been ten years since I finished I’ll Be Yours For a Song.
I was like …wait, wasn’t it 2015? Didn’t seem like it could have been that long ago, but I went and checked, and yep, AO3 confirms: Started 3/15/15, final chapter posted 9/2 of the same year. Which means I would have finished writing it in the last couple days of August.
I doubt very much that the vast majority of people following me here don’t know this, but just on the off-chance that a few of you don’t: in the early days of my most intense period of activity in The Walking Dead fandom—specifically in the Daryl/Beth pairing—I wrote a story. It started out as a cute AU one-shot inspired by a friend, and as such things are sometimes wont to do, it blew up and absolutely wrecked my life.
I’ve never had an experience quite like writing that fic, and I don’t expect to ever have it again. I’ve had more acutely intense writing experiences—I’ve spoken elsewhere about the two fics that I ended up writing in almost a kind of ecstatic trance—but the length of IBYFAS, the length of time over which I sustained its pace, the unexpectedness of it, the way it sometimes felt literally like dipping into a pool of magic, the bereavement I felt when it was over and I couldn’t write it anymore, and the wild emotional feedback loop that I developed with its readership… I doubt that’ll be repeated.
Which I’m fine with. It wasn’t the kind of experience that could or should be sustained. And something of its magic would be dulled, I think, if it ever did precisely repeat itself.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the readers lately. I actually think about the people who went on that journey with me pretty frequently. I still get new comments on that fic from people who are struggling to articulate their experience of reading it, and I never know what to say to them, not least because I struggle to articulate my own experience even now. It’s awkward to be—allegedly—a professional writer and try to describe to people just how overwhelmingly powerful that experience was without sounding at best slightly unhinged. Or perhaps merely as though I have my priorities hopelessly in the wrong place, because shouldn’t I feel that way about my Real Writing? My ✨Original Writing✨?
Fuck, I dunno.
That story came to me when I needed it, when I was feeling lost and worried and deeply uncertain about my own future. It felt like a gift, and I wanted to give it to my community as the same. Some of it, I will readily admit, was narcissism—I think you don’t try to make it as a creative person in any professional capacity if there isn’t some void inside you screaming PLEASE GOD LOVE ME, I NEED YOU ALL TO LOVE ME—but also I was just kind of in awe of this thing, which often didn’t even feel like it was coming from me, and I wanted so much to experience it through the eyes and the minds of other people the same way we desperately want to experience anything we love through sharing it.
You know? You know how you’ll rush off to someone whose opinion you really care about and grab them by the face all You must read/watch/listen to/play this right fucking now? That’s how it was, I swear. Less PLEASE LOVE ME and more Please someone love this with me because if I have to love it alone I think I might actually explode
That’s part of why I talked so goddamn much about it as I was writing it. I’m sure that came off as egotistical as hell—and again, yeah, that was definitely there—but also I was just… being a fan of this thing. Trying to process the feelings behind that. What do you do when you’re in that position? You write silly obsessive overdone meta, of course.
What I think I haven’t talked about nearly as much is how deeply conflicted I still feel about that, not least because I haven’t stopped writing stuff I love intensely and don’t entirely feel as if I personally created it, and I want so much for people to love it with me. I wince when I feel like that. It feels vaguely pathetic. Grasping, desperate, thirsty, cringe, God, can’t you just be cool about this, for once in your life can you fucking be COOL, you UNBELIEVABLE LOSER
But so much of writing something is ultimately coming from a place of wanting to not be alone. I think we all sense the truth of that, whether or not it’s a thing we do. Is that pathetic and cringe? Sure. Welcome to being human, I guess.
I’m telling you about this tonight because I’m thinking about this bizarre, extraordinary, life-wrecking story that happened to me ten years ago. I’m telling you about it because for a variety of reasons, for the last month and change I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why I write at all, why it’s worth anything in the face of such overwhelming darkness, why it’s something to which I want to devote so much of my one wild and precious life—and whether any of that is still true.
I’m telling you about it because I think it might actually be happening again.
No, not precisely the same. I meant that. But in many ways the same—and every important way, profoundly different.
Probably the biggest difference is that I’m not actually so sure I want to—or should—tell you about it at all. I’m not sure I should tell anyone. Too late, I have, but yes.
I don’t think this is the kind of thing I should lay out all in one block. So let’s let this percolate for a bit and I’ll get back to you.
Of course most of us who write want them. I’d venture to say the vast majority of us want them very badly. I’ve already told you—I probably don’t need to tell you—about how much of that likely comes from a place of loneliness, a need to be seen and affirmed, but I think for many of us it goes beyond a basic need for attention and adulation. For many of us it’s about reaching into some deep, raw, bleeding part of us, pulling out something that feels real and vital, hacking it into the shape of words and then showing it to people as a candidly kind of fucked up way of saying Do you understand what I’ve been trying to tell people, do you see it now, do you see this part of me, can you see what I’ve been needing people to see, anyone, even one person—but the thing is that one person is rarely sufficient to make the need go away.
I think that when you’re a particular kind of lonely child who has difficulty forming relationships with other kids your age, really with anyone, who gets teased or even bullied for that, who frequently retreats into private imaginative worlds where acceptance and understanding aren’t elusive, where you don’t feel quite so scared and out of control all the time, part of you never stops being that lonely child, and part of you never really believes that you’re okay. That you’re enough. If you find yourself affirmed, you need that affirmation to continue. If it stops, you wonder what you did wrong. Maybe you wonder if the affirmation was ever real to begin with.
When I was that kid, other kids would pretend to be my friend for a day or so just so they could rip the rug out and announce they were kidding the whole time. I guess it was a funny prank. I guess maybe I have them to thank, in part, for what I do now and why.
And yes, that was mean, and it left scars, but I think they did it partly because they could sense that needy void already present. They could smell the desperation like sharks smell blood in the water.
I told you about how, with I’ll Be Yours For a Song, I was able to enjoy it mostly along with other people, as something that came through me rather than from me, and that’s true. But that hasn’t been true of everything I’ve written; again, that story was very special. I’ve been desperate. I’ve gotten passive-aggressive about it. I’ve really let it eat away at me, when I’ve felt like something I wrote didn’t get the attention I felt like it deserved—and that’s true of both my fannish and my professional writing. The difference is that professional writing is always such a wild shot in the dark, and after a while you—ideally—get used to the notion that whatever you write will probably vanish beneath the surface, and it often doesn’t even really have much to do with whether or not it’s good. Whereas fanfic is by nature a communal exercise; I think one is inclined to write so much more for other people in that context.
Which can make the desperation worse and more corrosive and much, much more embarrassing.
A while back, I came to the conclusion that if I was going to be able to continue to do this, I had to try to find a way to make this part of me shut the fuck up.
That was a bit easier by then, because I’d mostly drifted away from TWD fandom; I’m obviously still working on The Good Stars, I’m still poking at other things here and there—or I want to—but I really wasn’t in a fandom anymore the way I had been. I wrote a few things in the Dishonored universe, a couple of which I think are genuinely pretty fantastic, but because I came to those stories more because I merely wanted to write them and less because I intended to participate in any community, I discovered that readers were kind of… mattering less, a little. Don’t get me wrong, I still really wanted them, I loved when I got those dream AO3 comments that include lengthy reactions and reflections and screaming, but they weren’t a fixation anymore. I wouldn’t get frustrated and wonder why I was even writing the story in question if I didn’t get any.
Because the work was so fun. Just the work. There were moments when I felt like the finished product was almost incidental. Which I’d had flashes of before, with IBYFAS; I recall how I felt when it was done and I knew I couldn’t work on it anymore, which was—again—a kind of bereavement.
I look at the plague of generative AI and what its boosters seem to think about what creative work is, and I feel like there’s something there that touches on what I’m talking about here, which is that these are people who are completely incapable of comprehending the joy in the work itself. They would rather have written than be writing. It’s all product, no process. I think that’s a stunted, impoverished, awful way to go about this business, but I also think it’s extremely ill-advised, because say you have the product, and then… what? I mean, if all you’re really interested in is getting paid, then cool, but what if you want something more? What if you want to be taken seriously as a creative person? What if you want people to really love what you made, and tell you so?
Like… I hate to tell you this, but the odds of that are not terrific. You might get a few—if you’re very lucky you might get many—but if you have that needy desperate void in you the way I do, those people are never going to be enough to fill it. You’re a junkie, and you’re always going to need another fix.
You cannot depend on that. For your own emotional and mental wellbeing, you simply cannot.
Which means you have to love the work. You have to love it so much that the work itself is enough to feed that emptiness, sufficient at least to keep you working. I think the best thing, as a creator, is to love the work so outrageously fucking much that you can make something and never share it with anyone, and it’s fine.
No, that’s not me, and I don’t know that it ever will be, and I doubt very much that it’s anyone I know. It just strikes me as a kind of creative Nirvana is all.
Except what if something kind of like that happened? Writing something and loving the work enough that sharing it just sort of… not only isn’t something you feel compelled to do, but is something about which you find yourself feeling profoundly ambivalent. If you’re me, needy desperate void-haunted me, what the fuck do you do with that?
That’s what I’m trying to work through, because that’s what’s happening.
I didn’t realize until tonight that it’s been ten years since I finished I’ll Be Yours For a Song.
I was like …wait, wasn’t it 2015? Didn’t seem like it could have been that long ago, but I went and checked, and yep, AO3 confirms: Started 3/15/15, final chapter posted 9/2 of the same year. Which means I would have finished writing it in the last couple days of August.
I doubt very much that the vast majority of people following me here don’t know this, but just on the off-chance that a few of you don’t: in the early days of my most intense period of activity in The Walking Dead fandom—specifically in the Daryl/Beth pairing—I wrote a story. It started out as a cute AU one-shot inspired by a friend, and as such things are sometimes wont to do, it blew up and absolutely wrecked my life.
I’ve never had an experience quite like writing that fic, and I don’t expect to ever have it again. I’ve had more acutely intense writing experiences—I’ve spoken elsewhere about the two fics that I ended up writing in almost a kind of ecstatic trance—but the length of IBYFAS, the length of time over which I sustained its pace, the unexpectedness of it, the way it sometimes felt literally like dipping into a pool of magic, the bereavement I felt when it was over and I couldn’t write it anymore, and the wild emotional feedback loop that I developed with its readership… I doubt that’ll be repeated.
Which I’m fine with. It wasn’t the kind of experience that could or should be sustained. And something of its magic would be dulled, I think, if it ever did precisely repeat itself.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the readers lately. I actually think about the people who went on that journey with me pretty frequently. I still get new comments on that fic from people who are struggling to articulate their experience of reading it, and I never know what to say to them, not least because I struggle to articulate my own experience even now. It’s awkward to be—allegedly—a professional writer and try to describe to people just how overwhelmingly powerful that experience was without sounding at best slightly unhinged. Or perhaps merely as though I have my priorities hopelessly in the wrong place, because shouldn’t I feel that way about my Real Writing? My ✨Original Writing✨?
Fuck, I dunno.
That story came to me when I needed it, when I was feeling lost and worried and deeply uncertain about my own future. It felt like a gift, and I wanted to give it to my community as the same. Some of it, I will readily admit, was narcissism—I think you don’t try to make it as a creative person in any professional capacity if there isn’t some void inside you screaming PLEASE GOD LOVE ME, I NEED YOU ALL TO LOVE ME—but also I was just kind of in awe of this thing, which often didn’t even feel like it was coming from me, and I wanted so much to experience it through the eyes and the minds of other people the same way we desperately want to experience anything we love through sharing it.
You know? You know how you’ll rush off to someone whose opinion you really care about and grab them by the face all You must read/watch/listen to/play this right fucking now? That’s how it was, I swear. Less PLEASE LOVE ME and more Please someone love this with me because if I have to love it alone I think I might actually explode
That’s part of why I talked so goddamn much about it as I was writing it. I’m sure that came off as egotistical as hell—and again, yeah, that was definitely there—but also I was just… being a fan of this thing. Trying to process the feelings behind that. What do you do when you’re in that position? You write silly obsessive overdone meta, of course.
What I think I haven’t talked about nearly as much is how deeply conflicted I still feel about that, not least because I haven’t stopped writing stuff I love intensely and don’t entirely feel as if I personally created it, and I want so much for people to love it with me. I wince when I feel like that. It feels vaguely pathetic. Grasping, desperate, thirsty, cringe, God, can’t you just be cool about this, for once in your life can you fucking be COOL, you UNBELIEVABLE LOSER
But so much of writing something is ultimately coming from a place of wanting to not be alone. I think we all sense the truth of that, whether or not it’s a thing we do. Is that pathetic and cringe? Sure. Welcome to being human, I guess.
I’m telling you about this tonight because I’m thinking about this bizarre, extraordinary, life-wrecking story that happened to me ten years ago. I’m telling you about it because for a variety of reasons, for the last month and change I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why I write at all, why it’s worth anything in the face of such overwhelming darkness, why it’s something to which I want to devote so much of my one wild and precious life—and whether any of that is still true.
I’m telling you about it because I think it might actually be happening again.
No, not precisely the same. I meant that. But in many ways the same—and every important way, profoundly different.
Probably the biggest difference is that I’m not actually so sure I want to—or should—tell you about it at all. I’m not sure I should tell anyone. Too late, I have, but yes.
I don’t think this is the kind of thing I should lay out all in one block. So let’s let this percolate for a bit and I’ll get back to you.
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we saw these flyers go up a couple of weeks ago and when the day finally came we decided we were curious enough to check it out. turns out we weren’t alone in that and so we ended up joining HUNDREDS of people on calton hill to watch, as advertised, a man fold a fitted sheet
it's gotta be great to be a like casually worshipper of an apocalyptic god of destruction and evil. like every time something awful happens you can just chalk it up as another win for lord blooddeath and smile a little
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Please send me the training or tutorial in a written format with maybe some screenshots if necessary. I don't want a video tutorial. I don't want to waste time trying to scroll to the exact moment in the instructions that I need and then have to pause and replay it because I missed the .01 seconds of actually relevant information.
Please. Text. Maybe some images for clarification. I can read. I promise.
Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?
If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.
We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.
We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.
Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.
In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.
It worked.
The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.
It worked.
Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.
It worked.
The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.
The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.
This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.
Nothing less.
One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.
For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.
Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.
Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.
It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.
One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.
If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.
All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.
We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.
Coughing up blood doesn't make sense for 99% of injuries and illnesses in fiction but it's HOT and I think the sexiness of whump outweighs the medical accuracy most of the time. I WILL die on this hill and I will be coughing up blood as I do so.
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Mike and Tom believed they might get to live in Paradise for the rest of whatever lives remained to them. But when an unexpected affliction strikes, they’re forced to make a final journey back to the world from which Mike has been fleeing, and which they both assumed they’d never see again—
And in which both terrible hardship and indescribable joy might be waiting for them.
fandom: Harsh Realm
rating: explicit
tags: post-canon, traumatic brain injuries, depression, angst, hurt/comfort, disability, implied/referenced homophobia, romance, gratuitous poetry, implied/referenced rape/non-con, implied/referenced torture, suicidal thoughts, porn with feelings, I swear this thing is not nearly as dark as the tags might imply, hallucinations
Look at what I’ve done to us.
He needs it to be real. He doesn’t care if it’s agony. They’re here and they’re together, and even if it’s excruciating he can bear it, they both can, it doesn’t matter, because it’s real. And he’s not going to do the thing he knows those moving lips were beginning to articulate, that thing most feared. He’s not. Not in this world or any other. Not fucking ever.