#fantasy writeblr

art for my fantasy novel THE DAY MY DREAM DIED

FIRE IN THE MOONLIGHT, my summer novel, is about:

in ebook format only!

Do you like vampires and werewolves? Do you like monster hunters and unlikely allies? Then you might enjoy this!

There is fantasy-typical violence, but descriptions of gore are limited. No romance, but friendship, found family, and a friendly ghost.

On Google Play Books, Thalia, Kobo, Barnes & Noble,

it will never be on Amazon, but should be up just about everywhere else in the near future as well, depending on how quick the individual processes are. Happy book birthday to me! Yay! Now back to writing.

Hi hello, and welcome to my little writing corner!

You can call me Flora (she/her), and I’m hoping to carve out a place for myself in the writing community here on tumblr and follow along with new writing projects, as well as hopefully garner some interest in my own!

I hate the idea of creating this thing and asking for interaction without doing so myself; I am a huge believer of the idea of community, of bettering and bolstering other content creators, and participating in something bigger than myself. So, tag games, asks, challenges, and so on and so forth, are all welcomed and encouraged - additionally, I LOVE hearing about other people’s works, with a particular weak spot for high/dark fantasy, as well as urban fantasy.

Thank you for your time in reading this, if you are a writeblr, interact with this post and I’ll check out your blog! In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning about my wips, they’re below the cut - I am a predominantly adventure fantasy writer, taking inspiration from D&D and real world mythos.

A QUANDARY OF KINGS: or "Words don't have to mean anything I don't want them to" A Queer Revision of History in which characters redefine words to suit them and the late medieval drama of royal successions.

*While I wait for more feedback for A Woman of No Importance, I wrote something that is definitely not a sequel.

When Royal Historian Annie Dorsey unveils a new exhibit outlining the Kings of Noske from the Early Ages to the Modern Times, her inclusion of one figure causes an unexpected controversy, reigniting a long-dead feud over the laws of succession. The year is 1398, and King Edvard VII has just died. Left behind is the pregnant and disliked Queen Clementia, hidden debts, and a horde of enemies. Noske needs protection, protection that no one expects Clementia and her unborn child can offer. Rivalry and tensions grow among Prince Edmund, the unreliable younger brother of the late king, and their scheming uncle, the Duke of Shipton. None appears as more of a threat to Clementia than the outspoken and strange Princess Magisend, whose supporters threaten to tip the country into a bloody religious feud. With the consequences and dangers of King Edvard's death looming, a choice must be made, and quickly. One that will astound historians for generations to come.

Told through letters, interviews, and Clementia's own narration, A Quandary of Kings tells the story of Clementia's short-lived marriage in a foreign court and the tempestuous three months after her husband's death. It is an excuse to talk more about queer characters in fictional medieval settings, the reality of political marriage, and very pretty clothes.

It's too early to call for readers but I may post excerpts or talk about it in my WIP discord so please message me if interested or learn more below!

Hello to all my fellow writing nerds, new and old! Thank you for checking out my updated writeblr reintroduction post. I've had this blog for five plus years and am long overdue for a post explaining who I am, what I create, and why I write. I'm hoping to interact with more writers on here so we can all make the writeblr community a more welcoming place. If you're an active writing blog, I'd really appreciate it if you could like or reblog this so I can follow you and we can screech into the void together and gush about all our favorite WIPS and characters! 🌱

A Little About Me

Heya, my name is Moon, a queer writer in her early thirties who's dedicated to bringing the stories in her chaotic brain to life. I’m a lover, a dreamer, and a creative writer enthusiast with severe ADHD (parenthesis galore). I love storytelling in all of its mediums, so you can usually find me reading, writing, worldbuilding, character building, or doing an unnecessary amount of research or psychoanalysis for my characters. Being a writer with ADHD has a massive amount of challenges, but one thing I loooooove about it is hyperfixating on certain details that really breathe life into my creations. ༄˖°.🍃.ೃ࿔*:･

Why Do I Write?

I write for many reasons, the biggest one being for myself. I love weaving stories using words because it's fun, challenging, therapeutic, and personally meaningful to me. There's nothing quite like the feeling of sitting at my desk while cackling like a madwoman as I type out some intense, dramatic scene that I know my readers will go nuts over. That feeling is only second to the absolute joy/writer's high I get when people tell me they've connected with my stories or characters. 🌿

How Do I Get Inspired?

I'm inspired by many types of storytelling mediums: art, music, film, literature, mythology, video games, animation, you name it. My writing comes from an intimate place and is motivated by my dreams, passions, and overall life experiences. I want my stories to mean something, and in turn, I want to share that 'something' with the world. For me, writing is about personal fulfillment, creative expression, and connectivity in all its forms. Ultimately, my hope/inner desire is to nurture the same cycle of human to human connection (inspiration) that started my own writing journey in the first place. 🥹

Moon's Favorite Genre(s)

It's difficult to pin down what my favorite genres are (because I genuinely love so many of them) but if I had to narrow it down to two genres, it would definitely be romance and fantasy. I love romance and its many subgenres (dark romance, paranormal romance, fantasy romance), as well as fantasy and its various subgenres (high fantasy, modern fantasy, science fantasy). As a bisexual writer, every story I write has LGBT+ characters, relationships and themes, but I love reading and writing about all kinds of romance stories regardless of sexuality. Love is love, and I love love. 💚

My Absolute Favorite Tropes, Themes, and Content

exploring human relationships: platonic, familial, and romantic

enemies to lovers, rivals to lovers, friends to lovers, strangers to lovers, lovers to enemies, friends to enemies, enemies to friends

sensuality, intimacy, slow burn, dark romance, spicy content

soulmates, souls bonds, magical ties, and mental links usually tied to villains (I love dramatic enemies to lovers w/ complex relationships)

angsty, whumpy, dark content exploring morally gray characters and the duality of man & human nature (inner light vs. inner darkness)

hurt/comfort stories that rip out your heart, chew it up in front of you, then spit it back into your chest cavity (always with HEAPS & HEAPS of satisfying comfort and emotional payoff after) ♡♡♡

identity, self-discovery, personal journeys, and character growth

experiencing, overcoming, and healing from indomitable trauma

defying fate and choosing your own path despite destiny's enigmatic design for the course of your life

very few stories I write have sad, unsatisfying endings (because I am a TOTAL sap and need my characters them to find peace), so expect that there will almost always be a light at the end of the tunnel. <3

Chapter One: The Naming

The forest felt wrong that morning.

Not wrong like danger. Wrong like recognition, the way a word you've said a thousand times will suddenly sound foreign in your own mouth. Something old had shifted its weight. Something old had noticed me.

I told myself it was nothing. The forest doesn't deal in nothing.

I left the trail anyway. I always do. My mother said the woods will swallow me one day, and I've never had the heart to tell her that they already have, that every time I step between the trees, something slides into place inside me that has no name in the human world. Out here, the noise stops. Out here, I can breathe.

But today the air was colder. Heavy. Wet in a way that had nothing to do with rain, more like the forest itself was exhaling, slow and deliberate. Moss blanketed the stones and roots in a shade of green so deep it looked black in the shadows, and the trees, the old ones, the grandmother oaks at the edge of the ridge, had closed their canopy overhead like a held breath.

I stopped at the cedar with the lightning scar. I always stop there. It's a landmark, a habit, the place where the trail stops feeling like a trail and starts feeling like something else.

The bark was warm under my palm.

Not the ambient warmth of wood that's been sitting in morning sun. Something from inside. Something purposeful.

I stepped back. The bark cooled the instant I lost contact, like a lamp switched off.

"Okay," I said to no one. "That's not nothing."

The crow called from somewhere above me.

I've heard crows my whole life, I grew up on the edge of these woods, fell asleep to them in summer, but this call was different. Layered, like three voices using one throat. It didn't echo so much as settle, sinking into the ground and the bark and the roots, absorbed rather than reflected.

Then another call. Sharper. Almost structured, the way language is structured, the way a word has weight.

I turned slowly.

It perched on a low branch directly above me, a crow, or something wearing the silhouette of one. Its feathers weren't just black. They were the specific black of deep water, the kind that doesn't reflect light so much as drink it. Its eyes were green and old in a way that had no business existing in a bird.

It studied me the way very old things study the young: with patience that has no urgency left in it.

Then it dropped.

Not like a bird drops. It descended the way shadows lengthen at dusk, gradually, inevitably, as if falling were simply a formality. The air around it folded. Feathers gave way to something else, bones finding new arrangements with a sound like green wood bending, not breaking. When the dark peeled back, a figure stood where the bird had been.

Not a boy. Something that had decided, for the moment, to present itself as one.

His hair was black and his clothes were the grey brown of old bark, and those same green eyes looked at me from a human face that wore the expression of someone translating from a language with no human equivalent.

"You're late," he said.

His voice had layers to it, like a word spoken in a cathedral, the sound arriving, and then the memory of the sound.

I laughed. Mostly because my body needed to do something, and laughing was better than running. "Late for what? I don't even know you."

"No," he agreed. "But the Vennwood does."

The word landed differently than the others. Not just a name, a designation, ancient and specific. The Vennwood. Even as he said it, I felt the cedar at my back pulse once, faintly, like an answer.

"My name is Morrigan," he said. "I carry the voice of what grows here." He paused, tilting his head with an echo of the crow's same birdlike precision. "It has been saying your name for some time. I've simply come to see if you were ready to hear it."

"My name." I stared at him. "The forest knows my name."

"The Vennwood does not deal in names as you understand them. It knows the shape of you. The weight of your footstep on this soil. The direction your attention goes when you walk." His eyes moved briefly to the cedar, then back. "You always stop at the old cedar. You always touch the scar. It has been noting you for years. This morning, it decided to note you back."

A chill moved through me that had nothing to do with the cold. "That's, I'm not," I pressed my fingers against the bark again, reflexively. Warmth, immediate and steady, like pressing a hand back.

I pulled away.

"What does it want from me?" I asked.

Morrigan considered the question the way someone considers how to explain something vast to someone very small, not unkindly, but without illusion. "That is not the right question yet. There will be a time for it. That time is not now."

"Then what is now?"

"Now," he said, and his shadow stretched slightly wrong behind him, feathers ghosting at its edges, "is running."

He moved before I could respond, one hand closing around my wrist, cold, colder than the air, colder than the moss, and the contact sent something surging through me, a current that tasted of deep roots and dark water and something older than either.

We ran.

The Vennwood shifted around us. Not subtly. The paths bent in real time, roots lifting and resettling, shadows sliding between trunks in directions that had nothing to do with the light. The trees themselves seemed to lean, not toward us, but away from something behind us, the way grass flattens before a heavy wind.

"What's following us?" I gasped.

"The Greywalkers," Morrigan said. His voice was even, unhurried, though his grip on my wrist was iron. "They are not creatures in the sense you mean the word. They are what the Vennwood sheds when it is unwell, like a fever burning off infection. At present, the Vennwood is very unwell."

"They want me?"

"They want anything that resonates. You stepped into the Thornring, the circle of roots back by the cedar. You are resonating."

"I didn't know it was a circle! It just looked like," A sound rolled through the trees behind us, low and directionless, like the groan of something enormous settling its weight, and I stopped talking.

Morrigan pulled me left, off what remained of any path.

"Intent," he said, and there was something almost gentle in it, like a teacher who has said this before and knows the student can't help it, "does not register here. Only presence. Only resonance. The Vennwood felt you enter the Thornring, and so did everything that listens to the Vennwood."

The trees here were older. Massive, bark carved over decades with patterns that weren't random, spirals, forks, long vertical scores like something had marked them. Morrigan touched each one briefly as we passed, fingertips grazing the bark, and they glowed faintly behind us, then went dark.

"Marking our passage," he said, before I could ask. "The old growth remembers. If the Greywalkers cross a marked tree, the wood wakes further and slows them." He paused at one that was wider than my armspan and pressed his full palm to it. The spiral carved into its bark lit amber, held.

"Good," he murmured, to the tree. Not to me.

We slid down a slope of loose earth and dead leaves, hitting the bottom hard. I landed on my side, pain blooming up my ribs. Morrigan landed in a crouch like the fall was a preference.

He offered me his hand. His fingers were very cold and very steady.

"We have a moment," he said. "The marked trees will hold them."

I sat up slowly, catching my breath, watching him. He stood at the edge of the hollow we'd fallen into, looking back up the slope, and for just a moment I could see something of what he actually was, not old in the way people are old, not even old in the way trees are old. Old in the way that night is old. Continuous. Presupposed.

"Why are you helping me?" I asked.

He looked at me then, and the answer that crossed his face was complicated in a way his words smoothed over. "The Vennwood asked me to. I have been its voice for a long time. When it speaks, I carry the words."

"And it spoke about me."

"Specifically, and repeatedly," he said, with the faint, weary quality of someone who found this slightly inconvenient. "You were not the first it noticed. You are the first in a very long time it has called."

The distinction landed somewhere behind my sternum.

Noticed. Called. The difference between being observed and being wanted.

"I still don't understand what it wants," I said.

"You will," he said. "Or you won't, and you'll go back to your trail and your ordinary mornings, and the Vennwood will grieve it quietly, the way forests grieve, slowly, in the dark, through roots." He tilted his head. "But you haven't run back up that slope yet."

He was right. I hadn't.

Something above us groaned, not a tree, something moving through the trees, heavy and directionless, wrong in the specific way that the cedar had been right, and Morrigan rose smoothly to his feet.

"The marks are fading," he said. "We need to move deeper. Into the Hollowreach."

"What's Hollowreach?"

"The part of the Vennwood that was old when your species was new." He looked at me steadily. "The Greywalkers cannot follow us there. It does not permit them."

"Will it permit me?"

A pause. Honest, not dramatic.

"We are about to find out," he said.

The tree beside him, enormous, elder, its bark carved over so many years the patterns had grown into each other, split open down the center. Not violently. The way a hand opens. The way a door opens when it's been waiting.

Inside: dark, yes. But not the dark of absence. The dark of depth.

"No," I said, because saying it out loud seemed important. Then: "But okay." I took his cold hand. "Whatever it wants from me, I'm not leaving until I know what it is."

Something moved in the canopy above us, the Greywalkers, close now, their passing felt more than heard, a pressure drop, a wrongness,

Morrigan's grip tightened once.

"Then hold on," he said. Not a threat. Not a warning. More like a translation.