Aster, you are singlehandedly drawing every storytelling fiber left in me out 😅 (but thank you 😊)
Okeydokey here we go! -spins the wheel a third time-
!! I'm glad it shuffled to this one, if my lil western novel (unnamed but referred to as Lasater, Kansas) was a movie this would be the end credits song. 😭
Oops I went and reread the entire ending of the story looking for a line for this and was astonished to find that it doesn't suck.
Dr. Alan picked up a sheaf of papers all bundled together and tied with a thin strap of buckskin and placed these in Bet’s lap. She examined them and recognized Lasater’s sister’s curled penmanship and cramped style of writing in every space the paper afforded. “He had these tucked in his jacket with him,” Dr. Alan told her. “Write to her. She ought to know what has happened here.”
Bet smoothed her hand over the letters. She wondered how many months or years they chronicled. She didn’t have to wonder how often Lasater had read them. The softness of the paper and the fraying creases told her all of that
something something my lil western story that on the surface is about danger and vengeance and justice but underneath is actually all about fidelity and friendship and making peace. 😭😭😭😭😭
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
This song is strongly associated with my urban fantasy, Cloy:
He wasn’t certain at what point the faerie stopped breathing in his arms, but he knew that one moment he was looking into the vastness of that troubled, chaotic sky as the very heavens seemed to quake and shudder and die, and when he tore his eyes away from the death throes of the universe, the spindly faerie, wrapped in colors of red and exuberance and life and vitality, was still and solemn and pale.
Captain's attention shifted from death to death, from still form to boiling sky, as if something beyond or inside of the clouds was fighting to get out or else fighting to get away.
None of this could be real and none of it felt real. Worlds just didn’t end, they kept going on and on while those who lived inside of them lived and died and were forgotten. But the world itself spun endlessly forward into space, always.
Not today.
The earth shook again beneath him, but it seemed to him a different kind of shaking, not like the tremors of the past several days, but the kind of shaking of an egg before it hatched, or an engine as it rumbled to life. Something was happening now. Something was beginning.
Above him the green sky shifted to a dark, unholy shade of purple. It bent and swirled in upon itself as it hungrily devoured the space between earth and heaven. The immense pressure pressed against Captain, intent on smothering him and every other living thing. He was in the storm, but he was not in its eye. The wind whipped debris around him, stinging his still-healing skin, and the storm raged and scorned and churned, but it was being drawn inward to that place in the center of that field, several yards away from him. Drawn toward River.
She was pulling it to herself.
(Oof, this scene isn't actually even written all out yet, but I found this old scrap and gave it a quick buff-and-polish. And it's a lot more than a line whoops 😅)
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA! The themes. The music. the book. RAOUL DE CHAGNY MY ACTUAL BABY BOY. JUST. HE!!
Phantommmmmm
I still have never read the novel. I owned it for a while and then I sold it before my last move. XD But Raoul deserves the world and frankly deserves better than Christine lol. But at least Hadley got Sierra.
Oh, also! Aster! I saw a video (I think someone on here posted it from youtube and it was in the tag) of Hadley and Ramin singing "The Other Side" and it was Great. I adore them.
So @ablatheringblatherskite tagged me to describe my WIPs badly
pick one (no consequences?)
farm guy just wants to eat potatoes, unfortunately must avenge instead
girl leaves basement to fall in love with boy upstairs during a thunderstorm
balto but in space, without dogs
what if the pied piper of hamelin used wind turbines
traumatized detective crashes superhero's retirement, it goes badly
bird steals fruit so boy steals girl, horse, kingdom, and talking wolf
Voting ended onMar 9, 2024
@saxifrage-wreath @cogentranting @rj-anderson @melliabee @freenarnian @please-dont-pet-the-okapi if you want to be a little unhinged about your writing
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Ahhhhh, yes! So, I promise all my stories are not fairytale retellings (regrettably), but this one is my other of that genre. XD
Beneath West-End Run is a Pied Piper retelling, set in a 1980s town in the American midwest, surrounded by farms and wind turbines, and the consequences of broken promises to a mythical trickster. It follows the story of a boy named Gill, a family coming apart at the seams in the wake of tragedy, a runaway named Eliza, mutated rats, and a curse that preys on the most vulnerable, stealing them away to a strange other world - never to be seen again. Gill is the only boy in the town who followed the Piper's music and yet was left behind to tell about it after, and the only one who can find out what happened and if the Piper's curse can be undone.
(Bits from my pinterest inspo board)
Thank you for asking! I really love this one and writing in Gill's narrative voice. It's very clipped and matter-of-fact but slightly poetic. Something like throwing 100 Cupboards, Arthur and the Invisibles, Gregor the Overlander, and The Black Book of Secrets into a blender. XD
Excerpt below the cut bc it's kinda long for an excerpt lol
I wasn't far from the Run when I met Eliza.
Eliza was not from West-End Run. She came from deep down south, where she claimed that the fishermen catch fish already fried, and tea can be mistaken for maple syrup by the ignorant. Where Eliza came from, all the men have guns, all the women cook better than all the other women, and all the children are as feral as coyotes and cougars. That's what she told me, anyway.
I was sitting on the top rail of some fence outside of town.
When Eliza came up the path and clambered onto the fence, gripping the bulk of her lemon-yellow skirts in hand, I didn’t say much. I was too busy watching for the slip I knew was coming.
There was a grating some distance off, on the wayside of the road that led out of town, and I had seen the air dance around it the night before. It wasn’t much of a movement, only a sort of wavering, but I knew it would be stronger come daylight.
So I came out, saw that the air still danced like heat ripples over summer asphalt, and situated myself on a section of the fence that was far away enough to be perfectly safe, and close enough for a decent view. Since dawn, six people had safely walked past the grating.
It's not unusual for people to surreptitiously gather around a coming slip and watch. There was never a crowd, as that was called indecent, but there was always someone watching and that was called duty.
That's why I ignored Eliza sitting beside me until she spoke.
“What are you looking at?” she asked in a soft drawl.
I looked over at her for the first time and knew she wasn’t from West-End. You can just tell when someone is and when someone isn’t. Someone else might have asked her what she was doing out on her own, or if she needed help, or if she was running away.
I didn’t.
West-End Run is where the questions decide to live whenever they possibly can. Why? Maybe it's because the questions don’t all the time like being answered. They want to be an anonymity. They want to astound and amaze. They want to look on ordinary, explained things and point and laugh and then go dancing off back into their mystery. They come to West-End Run, where we don’t ask too many questions, we don’t train a whole passel of scientists, and detectives sometimes find a job is hard to get. We like our questions, our mysteries.
Still, sometimes the wildness that gets strung around the town like a great ball of string starts to get tight and something, somewhere, cracks and unravels a bit and the strange things get out to the rest of the world. Sometimes they are wonderful things. Sometimes not so much. But once they get out, inevitably, they get answered, and suddenly the wildness is gone right out of them. To put it another way, I like zoos. Always have. But I still don’t think I will ever forgive the first man who looked at a lion and decided to cage him.
The girl in the lemon-yellow dress was staring at me and I realized I was staring at her. She was waiting for me to say something.
I went back to watching the grate in the road.
Another person walked past it and seemed drawn toward the iron-capped hole. They walked away slowly, glancing back over their shoulder twice.
“My name’s Eliza,” the girl with the lemon-yellow dress told me.
“Gill,” I said.
A woman laden down with grocery bags walked down the roadside as a few cars passed by.
She looked slumped and tired and I felt something in my chest rise as if to prompt my tongue into protesting, calling out a warning. I kept silent and Eliza and I watched.
The woman stopped a few feet away from the grating, and the bags she had slung over her shoulders and back just sort of slid off to the ground, lying in a heap all around her except for in front of her feet. She walked forward with slow, halting steps.
Even from the fence, I could see the air was writhing, confusing the shape and outline of the road and of the things around it.
The woman stood over the grating for a long while, her shoulders straightening, her head set high and lofty on her neck until she stood like a queen, despite all her commonness. She began to sway in time with a tune no one else heard.
Then the slowness of it all stopped and she flung herself to the ground, threw the grating off and disappeared into the gaping hole. The air around the hole stilled and I hopped off the fence, trotting toward the hole.
I stood over the opening in the ground. There was nothing to see but darkness, the sort of deep shadow that you know means a vast empty place, like the deep part at the end of the Run. How deep that tunnel ran, or where it led, I wasn’t sure. But I looked and saw the vastness and quickly covered the hole with the grating once more.
@ablatheringblatherskite tagged me for this one, here we go! (thank you, Aster!)
Rules: Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them, and then post a little snippet or tell them something about it! Then tag as many people as you have WIPS.
(These are, more or less, stories I consider in progress, though I won't admit when the last progress was made on some of them.) But yeah, ask away, I suppose!
And I'm terribly afraid I don't really know my writer followers at this point, so if you follow me and have some wips, please consider yourself tagged! (And/or, please feel free to hop into my ask box or dms to talk about your writing and your stories, I would love to hear from you. 😊)
2. How did you get the idea to write this? [Based on the other questions, I'm gonna talk about my urban fantasy novel here] As best as I can remember, the inspiration for Cloy came from 1) the part in Bandstand where Julia says "I don't need saving!" and Donny says "yeah, well maybe I do" and 2) Needtobreathe's song "Banks" and 3) the ending of Jessica Day George's Dragon Slippers, and 4) a couple random pinterest pins including an animated gif of a human!Starscream from Transformers I guess?? and something from the first season of Nikita??, and lots of stuff I had no pre-existing context for and hodgepodged together. 😂
6. Is there any specific ship you're planning to include? Ok, I don't ship much and I definitely don't write romance for the sake of it, but this story has a very important romance between the two protagonists, River and Captain. [sudden giggling over how their names basically suggest a ship anyways] Anyways, I ship them so hard, and they're so good for each other, and I put them through so much. 😭 The dynamic can definitely be found in the NTB song from the first question.
10. If unpublished, can you show a sneak peek of what you've written?
"Why am I here?”
Tyler frowned. “You don’t remember.”
“No, I don’t, that’s why I’m asking –”
“No, that’s what I meant. You’re here because you don’t remember. You were attacked. You lost some of your memory. You were awake when Professor Lewis brought you here… you don’t remember that either?” Tyler looked as though he were concentrating on Captain’s answer, as if it were suddenly not a casual check-up, but a report he had to give.
Captain frowned, thinking hard. “I think…" Something itched at the back of his mind. “Mathen brought me here after… after the hospital?”
Tyler grinned, relaxing a little. “Yeah, the hospital.”
“But why was I…” Captain looked down at his arms and suddenly noticed the skin was scraped and raw. A wide bandage had been wrapped around his left forearm and horrifying purple bruises completely encircled both of his wrists. He sat down hard on the bed. “What…” Fear stabbed at his gut, twisting his insides. He thought he was going to throw up. “Where did…” He looked back up at Tyler, who was staring at the marks as well, but shook himself and met Captain’s gaze. “I don’t understand.”
Tyler's brow furrowed with concern. “I’m going to call Professor Mathen and tell him you’re awake. Can I leave you here, you’re alright for a minute?” He seemed afraid Captain might do something unpredictable and insane if he left him alone.
Captain shook his head slowly. “Please, go call him. Is there anyone else here?”
“No, sir. Just us. I’ll be right back.” And, with that, Tyler turned and sprinted off, his hand already going to his pocket to dig out a cell phone before he was even out of view of the door, which he left cracked open. The electric light of the hall was comforting and Captain appreciated Tyler’s thoughtfulness, or perhaps absentmindedness, for leaving the door open.
He looked down at his hands again, trying to comprehend what had happened and why he couldn’t remember. Panic escaped his lungs in a sharp exhale, immediately forcing him to breathe in again - a sort of desperate gasp to fill his body with oxygen again. The gasp, the intake of fresh sweet air, brought a stab of recollection to him and if he hadn’t already been sitting down he would have staggered under its blow. It wasn’t a memory exactly, but like the feeling of realizing after a long night of troubled sleep, that all the trouble had been because of a dream. There was no memory of the dream itself, just the idea of having had the dream in the first place, and whatever he had been feeling in the dream. But whatever this was, it had not been a dream. Dreams didn't leave bruises around his wrists. You were attacked, Tyler said. Again, he thought he was going to throw up.
The echo of memory passed as soon as it had come and he sat on the edge of the bed in the silent room trying to catch hold of the last thing he did remember.
What had happened to him?
20. Give a vague description of something that will happen without revealing too much. [I wanna say something funny and cleverly vague here but have no braincells, just gonna share the little logline/teaser/synopsis I have.] "The worlds of fae and humankind are collapsing in on themselves, as a half-fae daughter of war and the scientist assigned to test her magic must choose to save their own in the division, or lose everything together."
22. Will this fic include more angst or more fluff? Probably more angst. Bit of world-ending stuff going on. But not devoid of fluff. 😊
