(some bright morning comes)

a book should be $5 a little drink should be $2 and museum access should be free and all hours

people will say “they’re only friends” and then show me two people who would crawl through broken glass to hear the other laugh once. two people who have memorized each other’s coffee orders, fears, childhood stories, and emergency contacts. two people who would haunt each other’s houses as ghosts. be serious.

Just an FYI—the original intention of this post was to challenge the way people say only friends, as though friendship is somehow lesser than other forms of love. As if being deeply known, cherished, and chosen by another person could ever be a small thing. Normalize profound platonic love. Some of the most fulfilling, transformative, and enduring relationships we will ever have are friendships. 🫶🏼

maybe orpheus always looks back because his very effort to reverse death means that he can't look forward. if he could look forward, he could accept eurydice's death, grieve, and keep moving in life. his refusal to accept her death is looking back. his going down to the underworld, asking hades and persephone for her life, trying to lead her out... it's all 'looking back'. he does nothing for the entire story except look back. orpheus! looks! back! it's his entire thing! the story ends the same way it begins: orpheus looked back.

stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation with the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.

It's always homosocial relationships b/w men this and that yaoi fujoshi this and that. I'm here to tell you that women are having straight up lifelong soulmate ass relationships with each other and just fucking men on the side for kids. But that's not my business

The husband is literally the sidepiece

I hate I when I get an idea for a novel. Like oh no here starts the slow sad slip n’ slide to dissapointment again.

You ever been 30,000 words and hundreds of research hours into a project when you realize hey wait a minute. I don’t like this. This is bad.

this is 100% true. I've written 6 complete novels at this point and every single time around the 40k mark I feel lost in the woods. Nothing seems to be working. I feel awful; I can't sleep. I keep going even though I'm convinced I'm going to fail. And then... It's like leaving a tunnel and getting back out in the sunshine. Stuff starts coalescing. Things that weren't working have obvious fixes. I "can write" again, except I was writing the whole time. It just felt hopeless in the moment. It's not. You just gotta get out of the woods.

Ah yes the Slough of Desponds. Professional author with 13 books, and this is normal for me as well. (Checking for tension issues usually helps!)

[ID: large, intricate beadwork sculptures of various mouldy fruits: a lemon, a halved grapefruit, an orange, a cherry, and a half lime /end ID]

"I love you but you're doing wrong in a way I cannot condone" and "I hate you but you're being wronged in a way I cannot stomach" are top tier and I need more of them.

“this character did not act in the most objectively logical way possible!” is not ! actually valid literary criticism

"Why didn't Sam just push Frodo into Mt. Doom?"