Scribblings & Scrawls

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

I showed this post to my boyfriend and he tried to take his shirt off like a girl and 

uh

and it made me realize that girls and boys pull their shirt off differently. /amazed

Its not science unless you write it down so 

Well done, i guess…

Second:

I fucked up

It’s all in the way that girl/boys shirts are made.

Girls shirts have less armpit room then boy’s do and are generally shorter so pulling it off over your head is more practical because by lifting your arms all the way up you make enough room for the sleeves to just slip off.

Boys shirts have more room and are generally longer so it is easy to slip them off over your head.

but if you take a girls shirt off like a boys shirt you will get your arms caught because there isn’t much armpit space.

and if you take a boys shirt off like a girls shit you will still have your head in it when you’ve lifted your arms all the way up because of the shirt’s length.

Mary was a beautiful baby, sweet and affectionate, but by the time she’s three she’s turned difficult and strange, with fey moods and a stubborn mouth that screams and bites but never says mama. But her mother’s well-used to hard work with little thanks, and when the village gossips wag their tongues she just shrugs, and pulls her difficult child away from their precious, perfect blossoms, before the bites draw blood. Mary’s mother doesn’t drown her in a bucket of saltwater, and she doesn’t take up the silver knife the wife of the village priest leaves out for her one Sunday brunch. 

She gives her daughter yarn, instead, and instead of a rowan stake through her inhuman heart she gives her a child’s first loom, oak and ash. She lets her vicious, uncooperative fairy daughter entertain herself with games of her own devising, in as much peace and comfort as either of them can manage.

Mary grows up strangely, as a strange child would, learning everything in all the wrong order, and biting a great deal more than she should. But she also learns to weave, and takes to it with a grand passion. Soon enough she knows more than her mother–which isn’t all that much–and is striking out into unknown territory, turning out odd new knots and weaves, patterns as complex as spiderwebs and spellrings. 

“Aren’t you clever,” her mother says, of her work, and leaves her to her wool and flax and whatnot. Mary’s not biting anymore, and she smiles more than she frowns, and that’s about as much, her mother figures, as anyone should hope for from their child. 

Mary still cries sometimes, when the other girls reject her for her strange graces, her odd slow way of talking, her restless reaching fluttering hands that have learned to spin but never to settle. The other girls call her freak, witchblood, hobgoblin.

“I don’t remember girls being quite so stupid when I was that age,” her mother says, brushing Mary’s hair smooth and steady like they’ve both learned to enjoy, smooth as a skein of silk. “Time was, you knew not to insult anyone you might need to flatter later. ‘Specially when you don’t know if they’re going to grow wings or horns or whatnot. Serve ‘em all right if you ever figure out curses.”

“I want to go back,” Mary says. “I want to go home, to where I came from, where there’s people like me. If I’m a fairy’s child I should be in fairyland, and no one would call me a freak.”

“Aye, well, I’d miss you though,” her mother says. “And I expect there’s stupid folk everywhere, even in fairyland. Cruel folk, too. You just have to make the best of things where you are, being my child instead.”

Mary learns to read well enough, in between the weaving, especially when her mother tracks down the traveling booktraders and comes home with slim, precious manuals on dyes and stains and mordants, on pigments and patterns, diagrams too arcane for her own eyes but which make her daughter’s eyes shine.

“We need an herb garden,” her daughter says, hands busy, flipping from page to page, pulling on her hair, twisting in her skirt, itching for a project. “Yarrow, and madder, and woad and weld…”

“Well, start digging,” her mother says. “Won’t do you a harm to get out of the house now’n then.”

Mary doesn’t like dirt but she’s learned determination well enough from her mother. She digs and digs, and plants what she’s given, and the first year doesn’t turn out so well but the second’s better, and by the third a cauldron’s always simmering something over the fire, and Mary’s taking in orders from girls five years older or more, turning out vivid bolts and spools and skeins of red and gold and blue, restless fingers dancing like they’ve summoned down the rainbow. Her mother figures she probably has.

“Just as well you never got the hang of curses,” she says, admiring her bright new skirts. “I like this sort of trick a lot better.”

Mary smiles, rocking back and forth on her heels, fingers already fluttering to find the next project.

She finally grows up tall and fair, if a bit stooped and squinty, and time and age seem to calm her unhappy mouth about as well as it does for human children. Word gets around she never lies or breaks a bargain, and if the first seems odd for a fairy’s child then the second one seems fit enough. The undyed stacks of taken orders grow taller, the dyed lots of filled orders grow brighter, the loom in the corner for Mary’s own creations grows stranger and more complex. Mary’s hands callus just like her mother’s, become as strong and tough and smooth as the oak and ash of her needles and frames, though they never fall still.

“Do you ever wonder what your real daughter would be like?” the priest’s wife asks, once.

Mary’s mother snorts. “She wouldn’t be worth a damn at weaving,” she says. “Lord knows I never was. No, I’ll keep what I’ve been given and thank the givers kindly. It was a fair enough trade for me. Good day, ma’am.”

Mary brings her mother sweet chamomile tea, that night, and a warm shawl in all the colors of a garden, and a hairbrush. In the morning, the priest’s son comes round, with payment for his mother’s pretty new dress and a shy smile just for Mary. He thinks her hair is nice, and her hands are even nicer, vibrant in their strength and skill and endless motion.  

They all live happily ever after.

*

Here’s another story: 

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

Of course he’s going to not take anything seriously. Of course he can shoot. The drinking, the skittishness, the recklessness, the sense of ‘keeping your head down’, the scepticism about traditional heroism….

The one with more actual experience of death, carnage and fighting is Jonathan. Not Rick. Not Ardeth Bey. Jonathan.

When Rick says ‘I’ve had worse (situation/odds)’ and Jonathan replies “ Me too”. That’s probably true. 

Drop The Mummy into the real world context and that’s a character who’s going to have seen a lot of his school friends die, along with the myths and tales of heroism they were raised on. Sort of makes the line where Evie’s scolding him for drinking/messing about a lot darker…

Wait a minute. Why is it being assumed that Rick and Ardeth wouldn’t have fought in WWI, as well? Johnathan isn’t that much older than any of them–in fact, there is a good chance that he, Rick, and Ardeth are all of an age. Just because Johnathan’s hair is thinning doesn’t mean he’s a decade older.

It was a LOT easier to lie about your age back in the day. So much easier.

Johnathan is the soldier who fought in WWI and became disillusionsed with pretty much everything except wanting to live (most of the time) and live well–and where is the shame in that? He would have seen some of the darkest shit humanity has to offer, and he kept going. And the thing is, though, archaeological digs at that time were DANGEROUS. Not from curses (usually) but from assholes who would turn up with guns to try and steal anything you discovered. Johnathan never really STOPPED having to deal with dangerous pricks, it was just less dangerous than death raining down from the sky in bomb, bullet, and mustard gas form all the time.

Rick grew up in Egypt as an orphan. What paperwork? He joined the French Foreign Legion, which fought in World War I in some seriously critical battles on the Western Front in Europe. Rick is the soldier who quickly grew disillusioned with everything, but he didn’t know how to stop being a soldier. Johnathan had a career and schooling to fall back on. Rick had guns, the talent of not dying easily, and not much else. When the army finally left him behind because he was literally the only survivor of his last FFL battle, he literally didn’t know what to do. At all. “Looking for a good time” was code for “Please someone give me a fucking purpose.”

“Charlie Kirk did not deserve to be assassinated, but I’m overwhelmed seeing the flags of the United States of America at half-staff calling this nation to honor and venerate a man who was an unapologetic racist.”

Also thank you for your Accidental Warlord series; it brings me inexpressible joy every time I read it

Oooh okay this is a complicated one. Let's see.

First off, and this is hard: don't compare your output to other authors. I have what my friends affectionately refer to as Wordy Bitch Disease. I write a lot, I write fast, and I write clean enough copy that Rose isn't doing copyedits, she's doing plot and characterization fixes. I start a new WIP...pretty near daily some weeks, and they do not all get done. My WIPs list is frankly fucking terrifying. But it's important to note that I have been writing pretty consistently for twenty years at least, and I was not as fast, coherent, or skilled when I started. For that matter, when I'm tired or stressed or just feeling blah, sometimes the words don't come, and it's important not to beat yourself up about it when that happens.

Second bit of advice: start smaller. I really, really like flash fic challenges and themed prompt lists and tumblr ask memes, because they make me limit my story to what can be told in a few thousand words. That lets me improve my craft without getting bogged down in enormous plotlines. (Yes, sometimes the story still grows a plot. But it's less frequent.)

Third bit of advice: take little bites, and accept that it's going to take a long time and possibly several drafts. When I started MBTT, I genuinely thought it would be 50K. (I am bad at estimating finished lengths of stories.) But I still took it one chapter at a time, and tried to have each chapter be a coherent whole, a chunk of story that needed to be told. When I'm working on the AWAU, if I think about the whole overarching storyline too much, I get overwhelmed and have to go stick my head under a proverbial rock for a while. But one story is doable, most of the time. I've had to restart drafts for some stories two, three, four times to get the voice and style and plot to cooperate. Be willing to say, That's not working, and try something else, even if you're really fond of what you've written so far.

Fourth bit of advice: learn what style of planning works for you. Some people like to outline in great detail. Some people like a sketchy outline. Some people, like me, can't outline - it kills the story for me. The WIP I started this morning has a notes section for important characterization details and the single plot point "Bandits?" Anything more than that, and I won't write it, because in some sense I've already written it so why bother doing it again?

Fifth and final bit of advice, because this is getting long: if you can find a cheer-reader, cherish them. Having someone in the doc leaving comments or emoticons helps immensely with knowing how my readers will react and with keeping my own enthusiasm for a story stoked high, which vastly increases the likelihood of it getting finished.

Good luck! Be brave! Thank you for the compliments!