vestal ao3

This is such a beautiful question, thank you so much!

So when I was writing frostbite, I was having a poetry binge. I read Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, and I read poetry by Warsan Shire (Bless the Daughter Raised by the Voices in her Head). I also read Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which is about two men having an affair in Paris, which is beautifully written and has a seriously infuriating narrator.

Some of the classic books I have really enjoyed are short stories or novellas because I'm a slow reader and gravitate towards short books. If you're writing yourself, I would recommend reading magical realist fiction. I think magical realism gives a writer this amazing sense of possibility - the physics of your world can be determined by emotion or metaphor, not only science. One Hundred Years of Solitude is THE magical realist classic, but Ficciones by Borges has been one of my favourite books for a long time. They are these very surreal, perfect glimpses into different worlds, and the sheer imagination is staggering. Also read China Mieville (especially The City and The City because it's cool as fuck).

Slaughterhouse 5 and The Word for World is Forest are important books for honest depictions of warfare (and also short!). A lot of what I have learned philosophically and sociologically, I've learned through reading fiction, but I would also recommend Achilles in Vietnam, which I came across recently and captures the universality of some aspects of combat trauma. If This is a Man is about holocaust survival and discusses aspects of what it takes to survive intact in the most extreme conditions.

A couple of my other favourites are The Idiot by Dostoyevsky and the Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix.

More formally, for sociology and philosophy, I usually read articles instead of full books (although I've been meaning to read Bad Pharma for ages) so take a peek at google scholar. It can seem really intimidating but just reading the abstract can give you fascinating insights. However, I'd also recommend Foucault's History of Sexuality (book one) because he's a terrible writer but has great ideas - maybe read a summary. For definitions of terms try the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy or Simple Wiki for things that seem really dense. Also search for examples of philosophical ideas - that can clear things up! And read Terry Pratchett! He is one of the finest and most compassionate sociologists of all time and anyone who disagrees can fight me in the car park.

I have a quasi-medical background and a profound love of bioethics. After I decided frostbite wouldn't be a one shot, I knew that I was aiming to subvert the AOB genre and question how the biological features of AOs would interact with structures of gender and control. Throughout the story I was asking, where does power lie? Is it with alphas, who are physically stronger and have alpha commands? Is it betas, who have the power of majority? Is it omegas, who have the strongest influence on pack dynamics and a berserker state?

The question of who has power and what kind of power will always take you somewhere interesting.

Even though I've added a lot of recommendations, I also think it's good to approach reading like exercise. The best exercise is the one you enjoy, because that's the one you will do! It's cool to try out new exercises (books) but you don't need to become an expert overnight.

It's also handy to take notes and underline passages in a book that are very effective/interesting to you and consider your thoughts before heading straight to the internet. Give yourself time to think.

A final tip is to let people talk to you about their passions and hyper fixations - even take notes! I think it's flattering rather than weird, and it can take you to really unexpected places. Talking to people offers an element of serendipity and chance that no wikipedia hole or AI soundboard can compare to.