#material memory

Stone Recumbence: Light, Memory, and Liturgical Silence

The body lies still, but the window performs.

This image stages a dialogue between stone and light — between persistence and ephemerality. The stained glass offers vertical transcendence, while the sarcophagus draws the gaze back to horizontal stillness. One is time passing through matter. The other is matter storing time.

In the memory studies tradition, we might say this is a space where ritual outlasts belief. Where architecture keeps remembering even when no one is asking it to.

This isn’t a tomb. It’s a sealed archive.

🎧 Listen: Geography of Absence

Hello 💜 thank you! This will probably be very rambly…

11) Do you write scenes in order, or do you jump around?

I’m a big jump arounder (I’m aware that’s not a word!). I’ll get random ideas at different times and they go into a brain dump document for whatever I’m working on. If I’m stuck on wherever I am in the WIP or if I have a lot of free flowing ideas about a particular scene, I’ll go ahead and write that and usually that gets me back into the rhythm if needed. Sometimes I end up with a lot of standalone scenes from silly ideas and then I have to somehow weave them together to make something a bit more coherent – thinking about it now, it happens in basically everything 🤣 but it all works out in the end! A lot of my best work or even pivotal story telling scenes come from random ideas and I follow their trajectory just to see what will happen. Of course, some of them are also stinkers that never see the light of day!

15) What’s your favourite time to write?

Afternoon is best for me, so it’s mostly weekends or the odd few paragraphs scribbled on my phone on a cross trainer or treadmill. But I also love a good in-bed writing session when there’s an idea I have to get down on the page before it disappears. Probably not the best for my circadian rhythm however… and of course, there’s the inevitable times I drift off thinking I’ve written a killer sentence only to look back the next day and realise it’s absolute gibberish 🙈 sometimes I have no idea what I was even trying to say!

23) Is writing the beginning, middle, or end of the story easiest? Hardest?

I always struggle with the beginning and often write down any old rubbish to get myself going (middle of adventure such a perfect place to start and all that). I always wrote my university essay introductions last so maybe I should give that a try? I really should work harder on better opening paragraphs (I will go and study all my first paragraphs now, thank you!) The middle is definitely easiest as this is where my many random ideas come in and I always know the main beats of the story by then. So it’s kind of like working to a roadmap but also having a lot of unexpected turns and stop offs along the way. Endings can be tricky but providing the middle flows okay and I’ve suitably laid the groundwork for the reveal, confession etc I think I manage (readers may think otherwise 🙈😅)

40) What is your favorite world that you’ve created for a fic?

It has to be the ongoing series Our Life. It started as a one off (Material Memory) inspired by Alex wearing that white tracksuit top from 2016 to a Muay Thai session and what it might mean. In the first draft it had a brutal ending but my soft heart couldn’t take it so I made it more open ended. Then I wrote a second part to give them a happy ending and have used it as a way to write shorter pieces of fluff within an established relationship setting. Material Memory was the longest thing I’d ever finished at around 29k and I was so proud of it at the time, so it’ll always be special to me and always makes me wonder what clothing choices are really trying to tell us (see my ridiculous Alex in a vest post, plus I have a vague plan for a Miles in silk one 😅 so look out for that eventually!). But I do have ideas for at least a couple of additions to the Our Life series fairly soon. As much as I love writing pining and deep tortured musings (who knew 🙈) it’s so much fun to write happy, silly fluff where Alex is plain insatiable with the biggest heart eyes for Miles (after everything he went through to win him over) and Miles is just as fluffy whilst keeping Alex in check. It’s an interesting way to explore the dynamics of a friends to lovers relationship and all the challenges that come with navigating that situation. They’re all standalone too so you can dip in and out and don’t have to commit to reading the whole thing. But yes, two more parts coming fairly soon!

"Dream: The universe was open like a book. Me looking at it. The top right-hand corner of the right-hand page was folded inwards to mark the place. And on that small triangle of folded paper was written the secret of materiality — which was as elegant and faultless as a fractal.

In the dream I was so reassured by this, so happy, that I didn't think of writing it down."

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