#alecjmarsh

We are 57% of the way to our funding goal for AETHER BEYOND THE BINARY, with 19 days to go!! This awesome anthology featuring non-binary and genderqueer characters in aetherpunk settings has been in the works for a year, and we’re optimistic that we’ll reach our funding target so that we can publish the book as an e-book, trade paperback, and hardcover. Slow and steady, race winning, you know the deal. 😀 Things have definitely slowed down, as is normal for this stage of the campaign, so just a note that we’d always appreciate your help with spread the word about this project so that more people will know it exists! You can find our “main” posts about the campaign on different platforms using these links:

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Thanks in advance!!

You can learn all about the campaign, the book, the merch, and the authors, by visiting our Kickstarter campaign page!

And, today we’re introducing two more contributing authors: Flore Picard and Alec J. Marsh!

The Light Organ by Flore Picard

About Flore Picard: I’m a linguist and translator who lives in France and I have been itching to write since I learned how to. I started writing (fan)fiction more regularly when I was procrastinating on my PhD dissertation, and I haven’t looked back since. I’m also an artist who loves drawing both fanart and original art, and I have a passion for patterns and systems, for the beauty at the edge of chaos and the complexity of being human. I tend to write about queer and disabled characters finding themselves and each other and learning to take up space in the world.

Links: Instagram | Twitter

This is Flore’s first publication with Duck Prints Press.

Title: The Light Organ

Tags: angst with a happy ending, capitalism is the real villain, coming out, disabled character, emotional hurt/comfort, family, fraught family dynamics, illusion, in the closet, magic use, mechanic, musician, non-binary, parenthood, present tense, science fiction with magic, teenager, third person limited point of view, transphobia (mentions of) (past)

Excerpt:

“No, no, no—the organ, the light ring—it’s all about the imagination, not the mechanics,” Kas exclaims, gesturing widely to encompass the aether pool behind the glass.

“I’m just here for the tubes,” the tech—Gilbert—says flatly.

His face betrays no emotions, not even annoyance. Kas almost wishes he would yell or be rude, if only for the sake of feeling like they’re having an actual conversation, but Gilbert has always been polite. He just never seems to care.

“Fine,” Kas gives up. “We’ve got glitches. They started about a week ago. It could be a leaking tube, I’m not sure.”

“What kind of glitches?”

“It’s as if… as if the story stops responding to me. I know how that sounds, but I swear that’s what happens. It doesn’t last more than a few seconds, but it’s getting worse. Earlier, I powered everything up to tune it and it kept flickering.”

“Flickering,” Gilbert repeats, mumbling into his neatly trimmed beard.

Kas grabs a cane in each hand and makes their way to the organ’s seat. “I can show you.”

You’re Gonna Get Older by Alec J. Marsh

About Alec J. Marsh: Alec lives in the Pacific Northwest, where they write romantic adult fantasy and self-indulgent fanfiction. They make candles inspired by their favorite characters.

Links: Etsy | Instagram | Twitter

Alec is one of the editors for Aether Beyond the Binary and has also published multiple titles with Duck Prints Press. His novella To Drive the Hundred Miles (modern, f/m, trans male lead) was recently successfully crowdfunded and orders fulfilled. His two erotica stories Heart’s Scaffold (sci-fi, m/m) and Study Hall (modern academia, m/m) are part of the Contributor Short Story Bundle add-on.

Title: You’re Gonna Get Older

Tags: arranged marriage, christian, coming of age, coming out, cults, fraught family dynamics, friends, in the closet, lesbian, midwest, misgendering, non-binary, north dakota, past tense, post-apocalyptic, relationship of convenience, religion, song fic, teenager, third person limited pov, trans man, trans woman, transphobia

Excerpt:

There was a radio in the room, an old two-way they had found on their last visit and hidden in an empty supply closet. It was still there. They slid open the battery pack and snapped in a fresh battery from their aether lantern. Chips of the meteor had been encased in metal tubing to mimic the lithium batteries of the Before, but they were precious and had to be used sparingly. Stardancer knew better than to use precious energy on something this frivolous.

They popped the battery cover in place and pressed the power button. It crackled to life. They cradled it like it was made from glass. The dials made a tak-tak-tak noise as Stardancer scrolled through channels. Music came through softly. It faded in and out, cut through with static, but it was music, and not the kind made on an acoustic guitar. They adjusted the antenna and turned up the volume.

It was like nothing they had heard before, fast paced with a heavy beat. Even over the fuzzy AM connection, it was invigorating. They wanted to dance. They wanted to sing along with words they had never heard before. The singer screamed their triumph, and Stardancer felt invincible.

And it is here! A Penumbra Bang 2022 drawing for @alecjmarsh fic NDA No Loose Lips .

Their fic just sucks you in and is so hard to put down.

I’m wondering if it’s not just True Love’s Kiss, but True Love in pretty much every sense. 

Marc and Talfryn’s brotherly love. The Keep’s parental love for Arum, and his devotion to it in return. Sir Angelo’s love for his friends. Sir Caroline’s loyalty to people who maybe possibly a little bit make her feel like she has a home with them. 

Writing Behind the Scenes is a weekly Q&A feature about writing. Submit your writing questions as an ask to get your own question answered.

QUESTION:  How do you manage to describe stuff so well and so to the point?

Tellthenight: I am a to-the-point writer by nature, so I often struggle to use *enough* description. My first drafts are essentially dialogue and blocking. If there is description in that first draft it’s usually a lot of adverbs and generic words. I sometimes put in [DESCRIBE THIS] when I know I need description in a particular place but don’t have the brain space to think it through.

On my second draft I aim at getting rid of all the brackets and then trying to find better words for my first attempts at description. I use thesaurus.com, I use word lists, the thesauruses by Angela Ackerman are invaluable to me. I also try reading the fic out loud to feel the pacing of the sentences so I can place description accordingly. (ALSO: beta readers are good people to ask.)

Clpolk: I actually think about the scene location in some detail before I write the scene. I often make notes about a particular location, including full sensory details, and also what a particular character would notice in that location that others might miss, and why/how it might be important to the character's state of mind, or mood, or internal conflict.

But when it comes to writing it, I don't spend an entire paragraph on the weave of the curtains. I tailor the description to the point of view of whichever character i'm in, and use only the details they actively engage with - do they shiver in the draft from a warped window, smell the mildew and the leavings of mice in an abandoned warehouse, wipe a smudge of dust off their shoulder? Do they collapse in the middle of a cushioned suede couch - and then roll their eyes because the TV remote is on the dining table behind them? These are the details that ground character and setting at the same time, and they're more useful than an introductory description of a space.

Tryslora: I used to struggle with writing dialogue-dominated white room fics with little to no description. The way I've turned it around is to write as if I'm roleplaying the character, which both lets me try to experience the way they experience the scene, and narrow it down to their POV so I don't include too much. I used to do little exercises, like… when I was in college, and walking across campus, I'd pretend I was my character, try to see the world like they do. Catalog what's there, like are they the sort of person that's going to notice the flowers? Will the giant lilies seem really tall (like they do to me, I'm 5' short) or are they normal? Do they make them sneeze? Is the sun warm, or the breeze cool? How do they feel about the crowds walking by them? Okay, actually, I do still do this… it's incredibly helpful.

Like clpolk said, though, it's really important to use the details important to the character. One example I remember really working hard on was a kidnap scene. Mom gets in the car on one side, a van opens a door on the other side of her car and grabs her daughter. There's a LOT going on that Mom is processing. An adrenalin rush, so she's shaking, her breath's coming short (use short sentences to describe panic, or really long run-on uncontrolled ones). She hears a scream. But she's not aware of the way the hands feel curled around her daughter's arm. She doesn't know anything about what the kidnappers see and feel. She has a cursory view of the van--it's big and white and unmarked, and there's rust, and the door's loud when it slams. The engine roars. But she doesn't know what the inside is like. She smells the muffin her daughter was eating on the way to school. The coffee from her cup. Hears the silence in the aftermath. When I wrote the scene, I was shaking too, I'll admit. But you can be super visceral by really digging into the heart of what your character feels, and cutting out the rest. Use what will connect your reader to the character.

AlecJMarsh: what everyone else has said about POV is really important. Some scenes don’t need a lot of description if it’s somewhere the character has been before. Some need a lot if a character is anxious or gearing up for a fight. (My favorite descriptive scenes are the ones where characters are searching for clues or weapons in a room).

Another important thing to consider is the language you use. Flowery metaphors really bog down a paragraph. If the curtains are the blue of the summer sky after a storm and remind Dean with a pang of the summer he was fourteen and kissing someone for the first time, that memory had better be (1) important and (2) the only one in the description of the room. I’ve read stuff where the descriptions are so long I lose track of what is going on in the story. Only put in exactly as much as you need to set the stage and the mood.

AJ: To describe things well, you have to do your research. There’s no shortcut for that. Your imagination is great but don’t avoid google searches and asking your friends about things.

To be concise, take as many filter words and passive phrases (see also: state of being & helping verbs) out of your writing as you can. Doing this will not always make a sentence better! You have to make that decision yourself.  I also suggest not trying to do this while you write your first draft, it will slow you down. However, by critically examining word choices and sentences when you edit a draft--your own or someone else’s!--you can improve your understanding of what makes a sentence clearer, more concise, and/or better. Here are some things to consider when looking at a sentence or a paragraph:

What is this particular sentence/paragraph trying to tell me?

Are there any wordy and/or confusing phrases that can be replaced either with a single word or a clearer phrase?

Who is performing an action here? -- with the corollary that, if no one is doing anything, what purpose  does this sentence/paragraph serve in your story?

What is this particular sentence/paragraph trying to tell me?

Are there any wordy and/or confusing phrases that can be replaced either with a single word or a clearer phrase?

Who is performing an action here? -- with the corollary that, if no one is doing anything, what purpose  does this sentence/paragraph serve in your story?

It can be informative to read someone else’s writing with these things in mind, because you don’t already know the explanations behind the chosen words. Then you can apply the same thinking to your own edits! When it comes to descriptions specifically, think about how the character interacts with their environment (MAKE THEM INTERACT WITH IT! They shouldn’t just be standing there doing nothing.) and what the setting they’re in can tell your reader about your worldbuilding.

29: what's something really cute that one of your friends does and is totally endearing?I would tell a frigging adorable story on @actualdemon but she’d have my head for it, lol (the one about the beer), soooo

A large part of how @notquiteinsane and I became close was telling each other bedtime stories of a sort. Mostly her sending me things. The stories themselves were absolutely not the cute kind, but it’s next to impossible not to feel a swell of affection for someone who sends you the fruits of their imagination and signs them off with things like “Sweet dreams.”

31: what is your opinion of socks? do you like wearing weird socks? do you sleep with socks? do you confine yourself to white sock hell? really, just talk about socks.Listen, if I could comfortably live my life without so much as ever touching another sock I’d be all too happy for it. Unfortunately, I live in Texas and wear leather combat boots almost 365 days a year, so socks are a much-loathed necessary evil in my life. If it’s not cold, my socks come off immediately after my shoes when I get home. Almost every single one of my socks is black, with the exception of a pair that’s black-and-white striped.

That said, that striped pair is comprised of two extremely fluffy double-layered socks for when it’s cold as balls, and I kind of love them a little. Or at the very least, I hate them much, much less than I hate having cold feet.

38: tell us about your pet peeves!Buddy I got a million of ‘em. I’m a very peevish and critical person. I cannot stand people who chew with their mouths open. It’s so nasty. Of all the disgusting habits out there, chewing like a pig is one of the ones that most strongly makes me want to never see someone again in my life.

I get peeved when I give someone an extremely simple instruction that’s well within their capability and they bungle it by doing something I explicitly told them not to do. But as a ~learning facilitator~ part of my job is to be patient when this happens :) :) :)

Malaprops drive me out of my mind. One of the worst is people using “verse” as if it’s a form of the word “versus” – eg, “How about we verse him” or something fucking idiotic like that.

People who ask how you’re doing when they don’t actually care is a pet peeve. I call bullshit on it being polite.

Likewise, people who ask a non-rhetorical question like “How are you?” and then immediately continue talking without pause. You a rude-ass bitch

Folks not using tags peeves me. Like, tag your fandom stuff with something more than two letters, PLEASE, so I can see my dash through your spam without having to unfollow you. Or on AO3, I would really like to know if I’m gonna be wasting my time before I’m twenty thousand words in. I don’t have time to waste reading fifty pages just to find out you’re gonna spring daddy kink or bottom!Steve on me and ruin the whole damn thing.

It’s hard to say exactly, because Mick tried to bring up Ben, but Juno reacted violently.

MICK: What’s going on, Juno? You haven’t looked this bad since…JUNO: Cut it out, Mick.MICK: … when we were kids, and your brother…JUNO: I said drop it!

But I don’t think Ben was involved. 

There were only three human-faced sharks chasing them in the sewers-- one for Juno, one for Sasha, and one for Mick. And there were only three trials-- one for each of the trial-givers (the drink was Mick’s, Faust’s Funworld was Sasha’s, and the factory was Juno’s). 

The whole thing was meticulously researched by Dark Matters. And considering that the whole event was designed to induce trauma, I don’t think that Dark Matters was about to skimp on bringing up references to Ben. 

So my money says that he wasn’t there when it happened.

Thank you~

This is pretty much one of my favorite tropes ever, and I don’t tend to write it very often, because it tends to get dark.

On that note, if you’re sensitive to blood, gore, body horror, mind stuffs, etc, maybe skip this one. 

The existing AU it fits into is the Vampire and Werewolf AU, of which you can find the first part here.

If you weren’t expecting that AU to go in this direction, it’s probably because I got hit hard by the flu over the weekend, which resulted in me spending a night with a high fever trying to keep my insides where they belonged while this whole sequence was spinning in my head in an endless feverish loop. 

I think the end result reflects that.