#psychateuch

Preview:

“Thanks for the invite, man,” he says. “Great party.” Tommy nods, still smiling his crooked smile. “And now you say…” Shawn prompts him. Tommy raises a quizzical eyebrow. “…You’re welcome?” “You’re supposed to say ‘thanks for coming’! Come on, that one’s even easier than I am.”

So that's the kind of thing you Car Guys fans have to look forward to.

Thank you thank you thank you! It's always disheartening when I post something juicy and it gets no kudos (or, in this case, just the one) 😅 I think you'll enjoy this one; they talk a lot about the Despereaux affair.

A small, more digestible snippet for you:

“What did you think the first time you saw him, Shawn? Out on the mountain?” “How good-looking he was,” Shawn responded immediately, surprising himself. He always thought his first reaction had been that little spark of recognition, the curiosity about why he knew that face, but once she posed the question to him that way…he wasn’t sure if he was changing the narrative for the sake of the game, or if it was really true that the first spark was something else. They would have to come back to this afterwards, but for now, he had more to say. “I couldn’t stop staring at him,” he said honestly—something he knew to be objectively true, both from his own memory and from Gus’s perspective as a witness to the incident. “I just had to know who he was. And not only because it would have bugged me that I thought I knew him. I would have wanted to know even if he was a total stranger.” That, he realized as he said it, was definitely true. “I was supposed to be straight and taken and not ogling anybody on that trip, but I couldn’t help myself.”

And an even smaller one:

“Acapulca,” he said. She frowned. “Acapulco? Is that a new safeword?” “No, it’s Latin. Acapulca. Aca-maxima-pulca.” She covered her mouth too late to stifle her yelp of laughter. “Sweetie, it’s mea culpa,” she informed him, giggling. “Mea maxima culpa.” “Well, that just sounds silly.”

Last weekend, I was preparing to post a new chapter of A Scandal in Barbaria and working on another Car Guys one-shot when I came down with what turned out to be acute colitis and spent a week in hospital. It sucked.

I'm expected to make a full recovery and I'm already 90% of the way there, but I'll never be able to hear the expression "screaming crying throwing up" the same way now that I know what it's like to experience that, very literally, for hours at a time.

The good news is that I'm finally well enough to be writing again! The Car Guys fic might take a little longer, but A Scandal in Barbaria, Chapter 4: Someone Passing Said should be posted within a day or two.

Now, let me be clear: I can afford groceries, but am likely going to be ordering food more often while I recover due to the exhaustion of not being able to digest food for a week, and that is going to stretch my budget a little. I'm feeling self-conscious about this and do not want to guilt or pressure people in any way, but if you have a couple £/€/$/&c. to spare, I made a ko-fi. I would be very happy to get back into the swing of things by writing a microfic (based on a prompt or request of your choice) as a thank you.

I started replying to this days ago and I can't find the tab where I was doing it, but I'm not sure if it's lost or just buried, so I'm going to just answer now: this absolutely made my day. Thank you so much for saying this! Most of what makes writing fun for me is sharing it with other people and talking about it.