fiction_theory

Title: Something Worse Than Dragons
Rating: PG-13 (for fantasy action violence described somewhat graphically)
Prompt: Mutation/Physical Transformation
Words: 6500
Summary: Sadie is very different from the other shapechangers around her, and not in a good way. It makes her something of a freak among the freaks, but she's dealing with it mostly. Then, one night, something wicked her way comes.
Author's Notes: This is the first story in the Shapechangers 'verse I've created because I got sucked into origfic_bingo and never finished my bingo. The prompt for this was "mutation/physical transformation". I only got four out of the five you need for one and so I'm posting the four stories that I have as a WIP. You don't need to know or have read anything prior to this. You can start here. Other stories to come in this same 'verse.


( Shapechangers: Something Worse Than DragonsCollapse )

This entry was originally posted at http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/243605.html, you can comment at: http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/243605.html?mode=reply or here, comments will be read and responded to at both sites.

If you don't get what happened surrounding Quvenzhané Wallis you need to go read this post about the matter from author NK Jemisin. If you don't get why it was so bad and why so many people are (rightfully) angry about it - you need to read it twice. Maybe three times.

Just keep reading until you get why it's wrong to be sexualizing a nine-year-old girl in front of a crowd of celebrities (and I cannot imagine how embarrassed or shamed or uncomfortable the poor girl must have felt when that joke got pointed at her, but for MacFarlane it's like she wasn't really a real person and wasn't RIGHT THERE in the audience being at the receiving end of his unfunniest line of the night). Keep reading until you get that this isn't a new thing that us white people have been doing, going after young Black girls and treating them as though they have no right to be considered children and protected as children.

Let's also keep in mind the fact that while no one stood up to defend Quvenzhané Wallis when an unacceptable remark was made about her, one that ought to have had people booing and jeering and telling MacFarlane that he wasn't fucking funny at all, about three guys raced out their chairs to help a white woman up when she stumbled up the stairs on the way to get her Academy Award.

So the message is that a grown up white woman who can damn well pick herself up is deserving of instant aid and support from grown men around her, but a nine-year-old Black girl who just got sexualized and put at the butt of a terrible unjoke deserves none. Got it. Capable white women: totally human and worth it. Black girls: totally not human. (That last bit is sarcasm, which I hope comes across).

And protip to my fellow white women: as someone else said on Tumblr said, now is not the time to have discussions about whether the word "cunt" is okay and how you as a grown and very privileged white woman feel about its usage. Because it's one thing for a grown woman, especially a white woman, to decide that she can be at peace with that word or even like it and reclaim it. It's another and infinitely more heinous thing to hurl it at a nine-year-old child who is in a totally different situation.

Actually, protip to all my fellow white people: be aware of discussions going on that are Not For Us and don't be a big Count Buttinsky with your White Opinion about the matter. Read them if you want, but unless someone specifically invites you to the table, stay out. Be aware and prudent of how you use your voice and what the effect will be. Hell, do this always, every day.

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As always, I love when people play along in comments and come up with their own answers to these exercises

From 642 Things to Write About


Tell a story that begins with a ransom note


Turn in your wings or the Devil dies at midnight, forever this time. The note, written in scrawling Sharpie still smelled of the marker. She folded it up and handed the piece of paper to Asariel. His wings shimmered into existence for just a moment, enough to let her know how upset he was. Usually he kept them off the real plane with effortless ease.

"This is going to be painful," Asariel sighed.

"What? You're actually considering this? Come on, why are we so bent on saving the devil. He's the Prince of Darkness and all that. Why not 'let there be light', yanno?" she asked, breaking a smile.

"Because, the Devil doesn't deserve to die and if she does, the world may unravel at the seams. You know so little of the truth about her. You don't even gender her correctly, dammit."

"So she's the good guy here?" She raised both eyebrows and then shook her head. "You're telling me that Satan is just misunderstood?"

"I loathe that name," he commented, offhandedly. "Lucifer is as good as anyone is, angel or demon. Better, maybe. Think of it, if she has all the evil powers that you people attribute to her then why hasn't she used them to take over the world and enslave everyone in a pit of pure torment?"

"God won't let her?" Ellie hazarded to guess with a shrug and a head shake.

"Remember what I said. Your idea of God is a dangerous concept, be careful what you base on it."

"Okay, all right. I got it. All the gods are real and they're not real at the same time. Like you said. Still doesn't make sense, but I got it. What's our plan for saving the wronged heroine here, because I got nothing."

"No, but I do."

Asariel's wings shimmered and solidified into full being and Ellie frowned so deeply her lip quivered.

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Taken from 642 Things to Write About. Feel free to play along in comments! I'd love to see what other people do with these!


What can happen in a second?

A heartbeat, a breath, a spoken word, a sung note, a number changing on a microwave. Put them all together and they add. 60 and you've got a minute, 180 and you have the length of the average song and the time it takes to make popcorn.


A houseplant is dying. Tell it why it needs to live

Don't go! You bring color to this drab place where there's so little life. You're beautiful and leafy and green, a real kind of green. What would this place be without you? We'll take better care of you from now on. We'll water you and I'll buy plant food full of nitrogen and potassium. Wouldn't that be yummy? We'll even enjoy you more, show you to our friends when they come over. I'll get you a bigger pot. If you die, I can't get you back. Please stay.


Write Facebook status updates for the year 2017

1. Happy 2017 everyone!

2. Watching the state of the union address. Well done, Madame President.

3. I love my job but I still love weekends more. Now for some wine to kick off the weekend with!

4. My thirties are so much kinder to me than my twenties were. I'd never go back to them.

This entry was originally posted at http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/242725.html, you can comment at: http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/242725.html?mode=reply or here, comments will be read and responded to at both sites.

Well, I got 2152 words out today. Technically, I did most of that Friday in my paper notebook and then I typed it in and added some stuff today. But that's still a big damn deal for me right now.

For Christmas my sister-in-law got me 642 Things to Write About, and in it there's a question: "What does writer's block feel like?"

For me, it feels like I'm a house and someone just took a sledgehammer to a load bearing wall. I can feel myself crumbling without my creativity. So being able to write these words, even if they're the sequel to a novel that will never see the light of day is a big damn deal for me.

As I told my therapist, not being able to write in the way I've been unable to write lately (and all the other things) feels like a bomb went off in my brain and now I'm left with unstable wreckage that's creaking and groaning and I'm running around not sure how to clean up the mess or if the roof will cave in or what.

This is why I get mad when people want to insult writers and be cruel about writing, even really bad writing. Now, this doesn't mean I get mad at real and earnest critiques intended to say something meaningful, especially when that bad writing is hurtful and oppressive.

But it is why I don't approve of blatant cruelty and laughing while finger pointing. Because writing is hard, because being able to tap out 10,000 words is an accomplishment, being about to tap out 50,000 words into even a somewhat cohesive whole of a story is really fucking hard.

Right now, I'm barely able to draft a letter to a pretend client for my paralegal class that I'm taking. Right now, it's all I can do to write a letter that will probably come to 500 words and for which I have a preset format and formal rules to follow.

Writing creatively? Writing without formats and formal rules to follow? That's something big. So even if someone does it clumsily and in a way that goes down the same well worn path that others have taken, even if they do it tritely and without subtlety, it's still something.

It's still more than I can do right now. Which hurts to admit, in a way where I wince so hard because taking stock of what I've lost - at least for now - is painful. But you can't rebuild the house without knowing the full extent of the damage.

And this is part of mine.

This entry was originally posted at http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/242653.html, you can comment at: http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/242653.html?mode=reply or here, comments will be read and responded to at both sites.

I've had little if anything to write (creatively) since the beginning of January because I've been taking a course to get a paralegal certification that has basically sucked up whatever excess energy I might have had. And given that low energy is something I've been suffering from for a long time, that means writing has gone on the back, back burner. So has non-class related reading.

I wonder if this contributes to me resenting this class already and hating it. It's entirely too left brained for me and I know that now. I wish I'd realized it then.

But enough of that. I'm just posting to say that I am alive and I even have a poem that got workshopped by the writing group I'm in. ( Cut for brief babbling about my writing groupCollapse )


"No One Comforts a Troll"

I think of myself as
both ugly and delicate
Like a field of porcelain weeds
If an army of boots
came marching quickstep across me
what would remain?
and who would care?

What if the troll sobs itself to sleep
every single night, emotionally fragile
and broken and
what if the troll under the bridge is
dying of it
No one comforts a troll
So how does it go on
and does it matter?

This entry was originally posted at http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/242425.html, you can comment at: http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/242425.html?mode=reply or here, comments will be read and responded to at both sites.

May your new year bring you happiness, peace, love, prosperity, and joy!

This entry was originally posted at http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/242033.html, you can comment at: http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/242033.html?mode=reply or here, comments will be read and responded to at both sites.

Thank you to everyone who came to talk to me in comments about writer's block. I'm getting around to answering your comments, but right now is kind of not a good time for me mentally and with some life stuff going on.

But I wanted to say thank you, because the comments have come as a big comfort to me that I will write again, that writer's block isn't permanent and that I can crawl out of this hole I've found myself in.

So thank you. Thank you for sharing, and thank you for talking about it with me. I really am comforted and your replies made a lot of sense to me.

This entry was originally posted at http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/241906.html, you can comment at: http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/241906.html?mode=reply or here, comments will be read and responded to at both sites.

1. DW/LJ-verse, let me pick your brains about long term writer's block and what it is and if anyone ever gets over it. Because right now, I'm in a bit of a panic that I will never write again. It's been weeks, maybe months, since I sat down and worked on a project. It's like the mere act of typing has gotten harder for me to do. The words don't flow from me anymore. Heck, they don't really even come when I try to grind them out word by word onto a page or a screen.

I'm blocked up. Well and truly and I don't know how to get out of it. Anyone else ever gone through this? How did you get out of it?

Because right now I really am afraid that I've lost the one ability that I've always valued in myself and that's scary.


2. Dog bless sara and the very first fontmas in which she explains how to use Google Web Fonts really easily in your DW layouts simply by pasting a url into a box. IT'S LIKE MAGIC, Y'ALL. Which solves my problem of finding a layout that I liked a lot but didn't care for Impact as a font. I really wish that they'd get a new default font for new layouts because the Summertime layouts are pretty. And the one I'm using actually has a nice color combo. But damn, Impact is one ugly damn font to use. It's like using popsicle sticks to frame the work of a great artist. It just sort of ruins the whole thing. But that's my opinion and I'm not a pro or even an amateur when it comes to designing things. I just play around on colourlovers a lot and pretend I know things.

This entry was originally posted at http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/241566.html, you can comment at: http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/241566.html?mode=reply or here, comments will be read and responded to at both sites.

I just looked and someone put money into my tip jar. Thank you so much, person. ILU. <3. Thank you. That really made my week. No, actually, my month.

Person, you are a living rock star and I wish I could give you a big hug (if that's okay).

This entry was originally posted at http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/241388.html, you can comment at: http://megwrites.dreamwidth.org/241388.html?mode=reply or here, comments will be read and responded to at both sites.