Late Night Writer Rambles

“You are not lost. You are here. Stop abandoning yourself. Stop repeating this myth about love and success that will land in your lap or evade you forever. Build a humble, flawed life from the rubble, and cherish that. There is nothing more glorious on the face of the earth than someone who refuses to give up, who refuses to give in to their most self-hating, discouraged, disillusioned self, and instead learns, slowly and painfully, how to relish the feeling of building a hut in middle of the suffocating dust.” — Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly

this tumblr text post:

“To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” — Mary Oliver

From an interview with Kazu Makino:

Instructions On Not Giving Up, Ada Limon:

And this poster by Yumi Sakugawa

“You have to believe, in your heart, that even if you don’t work hard and exercise and think positive thoughts and make new friends and march triumphantly into the future, you are still enough. You will always have bad days. Being broken doesn’t make you a loser. You can crumble, and you will still be enough. Make that your religion moving forward. You are here to feel this moment. You are not here to become someone better. You are not here to impress or compete. You are not here to prove yourself. You are here to savor this life. Let down your guard. You are already enough. Believe it.” — Heather Havrilesky

“The first feminist gesture is to say: “Ok. They’re looking at me. But I’m looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but by how I see them.” -Agnès Varda

lyrics from the song Grow by The Oh Hellos:

“The world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.” — Mary Oliver

Also, if you didn’t care about the future, didn’t that mean you didn’t care about the stone either? You might as well give it to someone else. Maybe someone better suited than you. There was this little girl across the street who had an acorn necklace and played in puddles and always sat very still until the every last stray cat felt safe enough to eat what she brought them. Maybe the stone should go to her, she at least gave a shit.

You debated arguing or refusing, but your disinterest won out in the end. “Sure,” you answered, holding out a hand for them to plop the stone into. You weren’t scared of it, especially since it looked utterly unremarkable. If you tossed it into a river, no one would be able to tell it apart from the other rocks.

The three wizened elders, apparently the smartest of their magic circle, exchanged grave looks and you waited until they were done with their silent communication and their leader stepped forward.

“We entrust you with the Stone of Possibility, never use it and always hide it,” they said, voice solemn and carrying the sort of undertone that spoke of great importance. You blinked slowly. “Give it to no one, no matter how noble their hearts, how pitiful their tale or how silver their tongue.” You couldn’t help but imagine a genderless person sticking out their tongue dripping with mercury.

Like, his thought process is “after what I did, I have to be easy and perfect if I want Ed to like me!”

It eats him up inside, until he eventually explodes at Izzy, screaming about how he was trying SO HARD to be what Ed wants, what Blackbeard wants, and he doesn't understand why it's not working.

[ Link to survey ]

The ninth annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th August 2022.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, retweet this tweet, boost this Mastodon post, check out this post on Reddit, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks like Facebook. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 44,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

Thank you so much!

With thanks to everyone who’s made donations and sent encouraging messages to help me get through Covid and Charlie’s illness.

—

(This document is a fair and correct copy of the ancient text held in the First Temple Of Transformation, being the first and most precious of its holy writings.)

An Account Of Andry And His Demon

So there I was, about to be sacrificed to a demon.

I’d already made two escape attempts. Neither worked. A virgin with unused magical potential and the right bloodlines isn’t easy to find, apparently. They’d gone all out with the security.

The ritual was well under way. It was too late to escape from inside the circle. I theoretically had no way out. I’d never learned magic. I’d always been small and skinny, nowhere near strong enough to pull off some last minute bond-breaking. If anyone was going to come to my rescue, they would have by then.

 Theoretically, I was out of options.

But I’m a small, skinny guy who’s not strong enough to win a fight, who didn’t know magic was an option, so I’d had to learn other skills. 

I’d never learned magic, but everyone’s heard the stories. Everyone knows what a binding circle is. Everyone knows that it matters what side of the circle the runes are written on, and if I turned my head until my neck almost broke I could see the runes they’d written. They were on the outside of the circle. And it was a triple circle, too, and the stories say that’s the strongest kind. 

The cultists might have said that this demon was their god, and maybe the drones chanting down there below the showy sacrificial stage actually believed it. They couldn’t see the circle from there. But this demon wasn’t showing up voluntarily, I was almost sure. The cult leaders were compelling it to appear. I’d heard stories like this, too. They usually ended with a lot of dead cultists and one - or a few - leaders with far too much demonic power. 

I listened to the speech the leader gave before they started. Shorn of ranting, it basically boiled down to ‘after this night, our bond with our demon god will be cemented in blood, praise him, our path to immortality will begin, and so on’. So… the demon wasn’t bound to them already. This was an important sacrifice. Possibly their first human sacrifice, or the strongest, or the one that sealed the deal. 

When the demon appeared inside the circle with me, I forced down the panic with the weight of more panic. If I froze up, or screamed, or fainted, I was a dead man. The next few seconds were all-important.