This is a short fiction piece inspired by this post.
#Apocalypse
It wasn’t funny.
But, then again, it kind of
was.
Haley couldn’t stop the
laughter bubbling up in her chest even as she felt a few tears escape and
streak down her dark features as she posted what would probably be her last few
Instagram photos ever.
Haley wondered if things like
Instagram survived the end of the world. She suspected she wouldn’t be around
to find out.
She glanced around the half
destroyed street. No one wanted to die alone. Yet, here she was, her ankle pinned
by wreckage. Even if the creature didn’t make a second sweep, she doubted she
would survive to see search and rescue teams (was that something they even did
after an entire city got destroyed?)
Haley closed her eyes, pretty
convinced this was it. Her friends and family weren’t responding to text
message, so either they were dead already or somewhere without cell service.
She was going die. She resisted the urge to look up how long it takes to die
from dehydration.
That’s when her smartphone
chirped.
Her eyes flew open, unlocking
her screen and glancing down at the likes piling up on Instagram. Her post was
getting attention, people asking if she could take any more photos. Apparently
she was one of the closest people to the giant, tentacle creature rampaging
through New York City.
She shook her head, scrolling
through the comments. Haley almost scrolled past it, but one in all caps caught
her attention.
“EYO GIRL!! WHERE YOU AT???? TOM SAYS BASED ON THE ANGLE OF YOUR PHOTOS
WE ARE CLOSE BY!!!”
WHENEVER YOU SEE THIS POST ON YOUR DASH, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WRITE ONE SENTENCE FOR YOUR CURRENT PROJECT.
Just one sentence. Stop blogging for one minute and write a single sentence. It could be dialogue, it could be a nice description of scenery, it could be a metaphor, I don’t care. The point is, do it. Then, when you finish, you can get back to blogging.
If this gets viral, you might just have your novel finished by next Tuesday.
Goddamn it, it’s back.
If it stays back, I might manage to finish a third story this year. Jesus.
I swear, this is now my only writing motivation.
BACK AGAIN??? Sigh.
Okay, sorry if anyone gets sick of this, but it’s the best way for me to get myself to write.
Hamilton and, uh, idk hmm - STAR WARS AU. "pardon me, are you Master Burr, sir?" "that depends, who's asking?"
SHOWTIME.
So
some thirty parsecs past the ass end of the galaxy there’s this tiny nothing planet
that’s mostly ocean, and the planet is called Nevis, and one of its islands is called
Christiansted, and if anyone who didn’t actually
live there was asked to find it on a star map, they definitely couldn’t do
it. This is where Alex is born and this
is where his mother dies of some disease brought in by a trader and this is
where he almost dies with her, almost dies in a hurricane that swallows the
island whole, almost starves when his cousin eats a blaster, before someone
notices that—kriff, but this kid is brilliant.
Another trader gives him work and he proves rapidly that not only is he
a dab hand with numbers, but he can blow through a five hundred page holonovel
in a few hours and learn a language in a couple months.
His
mother always said talking was his strong suit and now he’s proving it, because
Alex has to be the best to survive, so that’s what he’ll do. He’ll talk, and he’ll write, and he’ll get
off this rock if it kills him. He wants
something to do, he wants to change
the galaxy, and there’s something murmuring to him, like a whisper of wind,
that he’ll do it if he can just get off Nevis.
We were lured by the fics ofc. That's totally why. Thanksies darling!
Oh my God, nonny, doll, you’re the cutest. I’m so glad you like my slightly deranged writing, you’re just. So nice. To me. What do I do with such nice people.
One of my favourite anecdotes about the first Golden Age of Piracy is that, at one point, Captain Henry Morgan left England in one ship, and arrived in the Caribbean commanding a completely different ship, and nobody knows why. What happened to the first ship and how he acquired the second one are entirely unrecorded.
At some point in his short career (1715 until 1718), the English pirate Ben Hornigold attacked a sloop near Honduras just to steal all the hats of the crew, because his own crew had gotten drunk the night before and they had tossed every single one of their own hats overboard.
Bartholomew Roberts, arguably the most successful pirate in history by ships captured (a whopping 470 in 3 years), didn’t actually want to be a pirate. His ship was captured and he was forced to join the pirate crew.
If you're still looking for fic prompts what about e/R and a secretly royalty AU? Or just anything with a fairytale type feel?
Okay
I see what you’re saying there but WHAT IF WE DID BOTH??? This got so long, I’m sorry, I got
overexcited about fairy tales and I wrote 5K in like a day. (No for real this is almost 5000 words,
Jesus, self, what are you doing.)
Enjolras is a
wished-for child, and he’s told as much every day by his mother, who bought his
life with a few drops of blood on white silk in a gold embroidery hoop. From the minute he learns to talk, he’s as
fair as the sun and as sharp as her needle, and his country adores their young
prince with their whole heart. His
mother Queen Lamarque is a good ruler and her Prince Consort is nice enough so
all is well, and Enjolras grows up believing passionately in the rights of the people. His tutors despair of him as a monarch but
are delighted with him as a politician—it’s very strange for everyone.
And then the Queen
dies, and everything goes to pieces, because the dowager Prince Regent isn’t a
ruler by nature and Enjolras is still too damned young to take her place and
it’s all quite a mess. Vital government
services are falling through, taxes are going uncollected or over-collected,
the generals of the army are making warning noises about neighboring countries
taking advantage of their weakened state, and everything is teetering on the
edge of chaos.
ffs I was supposed to go to bed 4 hours ago and I got caught up in your writing and your blog... I have no self control...
Oh, dude, I want to say I’m sorry, I really do, but I’m just kind of flustered and smug. I’m really glad you (evidently) liked it, though, and I hope you got some sleep in there, eventually.
I’m still watching Liberty’s Kids because REASONS and I watched an episode with Baron von Steuben, and I get why they didn’t include this in a kid’s show, but this dude is THE BEST PART of the winter at Valley Forge.
LET ME TELL YOU WHY, WITH ABUSE OF CAPS LOCK AND BAD LANGUAGE AND IRREVERENCE.
Okay, some background. Baron von Steuben was a Prussian baron who shipped his ass over to America in 1777 in order to help Washington whip the bunch of random farmers, miners, tradesmen, etc who formed the Continental ‘Army’ at the time into shape. He reached Valley Forge in early 1778 (after almost getting his own soldiers ARRESTED IN BOSTON because he accidentally outfitted them in red coats, honestly this dude’s life is just PRIME HISTORICAL COMEDY MATERIAL, someone get the fuck on that) and immediately made a name for himself as a complete–but effective!–wackjob. He would go outside in the middle of winter in full military dress and have all the soldiers (many of whom were lacking a coat and boots at the time, because the goddess of efficiency Martha Washington had not yet made her presence known) run drills from sunup to sundown, whereas most military commanders of the day were Pointedly Uninvolved in the messy day-to-day shit. He also continued the trend of having commanders who were still learning English (Lafayette spoke almost no English upon his arrival, for example), because when von Steuben reached America he spoke zero English and had to write all his orders in French and give them to either HIS aide de camp to translate or the aide Washington periodically lent him (fun fact: Lt. Colonols Hamilton and Laurens were his usual lent-out aides because they both spoke French).
NOW YOU HAVE SOME BACKGROUND AND WE CAN GET TO THE GOOD STUFF.
Let me tell y'all what my co worker does when her friends go on a date: She takes a picture of the person’s drivers license. She doesn’t delete it until her friend(s) return safely.
Everyone needs to be doing this!
I remember my first time picking my girlfriend up to go on a date, and I met her mom that day. She asked to see my ID to take a picture of it “just incase” I had/have good* intentions so I was cool and went along with it. 😏
Yes!!👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾If someone gives me a hard time about taking a picture of their license, that’s a red flag.
Girl, I take their number, license plate (w flash so there’s no debate on the car color at night) and a last seen wearing photo, smh. All my girls coming back safe or I’m on that ass.
If he doesn’t drive, send your friend the location or address of where you the date is taken place. If you change locations, screenshot where y'all at and send it to them. Stay safe.
There is an app called glympse that will broadcast your location to whomever you choose for I think I max of four hours. It’s a little gps program and as your phone moves a little beacon will move with it on a map
Adding that right now^
Safety is important. This is the first I’ve heard of the taking a pic of his license. I just realized how weird I’d probably act in this situation and apparently it’d be seen as a red flag.
the children these days being like………………what will happen when i grow up………what about fandom……
you will still have fandom! you’ll just check twitter on work breaks and write fic after you unload the dishwasher. you might get older but fandom stays the same age. your propensity to read fic does not vanish with age. where do you think all the best written fics from your fave fandom come from??? old as f*ck people. that’s where
ok but seriously, if something really small happened in your day and it made you really happy, but you don’t want to tell anyone bc you feel that it’s insignificant to everyone else tell me, message me that thing because nothing delights me more than enjoying other people’s tiny happinesses
I always want to hear you talk about your special interests. always. got a thing about Russian politics in the 1700s? tell me about it. know entirely too much about the mating habits of aquatic animals? nice, bro. can literally recite every Star Wars movie line-perfect? that’s fuckin impressive. even if I’m not personally interested in whatever it is you’re infodumping about, I’m happy that you’re interested and excited, and I’m willing to learn about things my loved ones care about
i really am a “text me if you need something” person. like unless i have something specific to talk about, i don’t usually initiate a conversation. if you wanna talk just to talk then im all here but dont take me not hittin you up as me not caring.
Phasma meets Leia somehow and is unmasked during the meeting.
It was a strange quirk of stormtroopers, Leia thought—bury them under flat, white plasticine and all those human tics and weaknesses turned inward, were trapped under the skin; right up until the moment you removed the armor, when it came roiling to the surface, pressurized. She’d noticed it in Finn, a tendency to emote with his whole body and stare too long; drum his fingers on datapads and the edges of tables, move like a blaster shot. The crew of the captured Domitia did it too—she’d been watching them on the monitors for fifteen minutes, and she’d lost count of how many times they stalked the width and length of the cells, restless as animals.
If she had been another sort of woman, Leia might have taken heart that humanity persisted, even in the midst of profound darkness.
Instead, she was wondering whether their meager supplies would feed an extra fifty mouths, and what she was going to do when they wouldn’t.
(There was a voice at the back of her head whispering, do what is necessary do what will keep yours safe, eliminate them—
Leia had a great deal of practice ignoring that voice.)
Leia’s gaze wandered back to Captain Phasma as the woman made another circuit around her cell. There was something different about her—the particular way she held herself, maybe, or the washed-out light on her hair—and it stirred the deep recesses of Leia’s memory. “Buzz me through,” she said suddenly to Lieutenant Luo, who jerked upright in his seat.
“Um,” he answered eloquently. He looked at the door to the cell block as though expecting it to open under its own power. “Ma’am? Shouldn’t we wait for…”
Leia waited, curious as to how he was planning to finish that sentence. No one was coming, except whoever drew the short straw from Intel, and maybe Luke or Rey, when the stormtroopers (inevitably) refused to talk. The Resistance didn’t have interrogators, it barely had prison guards—she hadn’t thought there was a need for them, among her guerrilla hit-and-run pilots and ex-smuggler logisticians. First Order personnel didn’t walk away from a Resistance attack, as a rule; not even into prison cells.
”….someone,” Luo finished in a small voice.
“Buzz me through, Lieutenant,” Leia repeated, not unkindly. She liked Luo. It wasn’t his fault she hadn’t anticipated this, that the sight of all that white armor piled up on the duracrete had made her blood run hot and too-loud in her ears. It had taken Luke quietly nudging a memory at her (aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper) to remember she could breathe at all.
The red rage was still there, of course, thrumming through her blood, whispering eliminate them as it moved in her veins.
Leia breathed.
“Yes, General,” Luo said, and buzzed the door open.
While sick in bed I kept thinking, or rather my brain kept thinking with or without my input, about the sheer overwhelming volume of fiction human beings have produced, like the number of myths, legends, novels, comics, games, movies, plays, original characters and even dreams and imaginary friends felt so vast and all encompassing that it seemed to dwarf all of our other achievements as a species and the sheer immensity and pointlessness of it all felt almost terrifying until suddenly my foggy mind was like “whoa, whoa, wait, WAIT A MINUTE….THAT’S WHAT WE ARE!!!!!! WE’RE THE STORYTELLER PLANET, THAT’S OUR THING IN THE UNIVERSE!”
So that turned into all these scenarios where for whatever reason most other sentience races could have technological power beyond our comprehension but still no knack for concocting even rudimentary child-level fiction and are so easily entertained by any shit we can make up that it’s basically our superpower
Humans end up paying their way across the galaxy just making things up as they go along and even our worst most garbage pieces of media become an almost priceless commodity.
You’re cornered by a tentareaver from the bloodstar or
whatever and she’s all “SO, EARTHBEAST…TELL ME ONE OF THESE FAMOUS FICSHUNS OF YOURS AND I’LL CONSIDER SPARING YOUR LIFE”
*sigh*…okay, once upon a time there was a tentareaver…
“WAS SHE OF THE FLESHRENDER CASTE????”
….Yes, the most beautiful fleshrender in her whole clusterhive.
To all of you writers who produce 5,000 word chapters, kudos to you.
To all of you writers who produce 1,000 word chapters, kudos to you.
To all of you writers who do multi-chapter fics, kudos to you.
To all of you writers who do one shots and dabbles, kudos to you.
Original works? Kudos to you.
Fanfiction? Kudos to you.
Just started writing? Kudos to you.
Been writing for years? Kudos to you.
Write stories that you don’t share but look at fondly because you love it? Kudos to you.
I am a firm believer that no one type of writing is better than another. The love and energy you put into your work is what matters. You all deserve kudos. So just know that if you feel like no one is reading or no one cares that I am, and I do.
The
woman is sitting on the ground, cast in lovely dawn shades of gold and pink. Her legs are crossed, hands folded in her
lap, and her lush white curls fall over one shoulder like an avalanche. There is not a speck of blood on her hands or
on her pants, despite the pool spreading slowly beneath Sephie’s back. For some reason, that is what Sephie is most
focused on at this moment—the blood is hot and wet and deeply unpleasant, and
she envies the woman for not having any on her.
The car that struck her and drew the blood is long gone, a hit and run,
and the coffee shop’s customers will not come for their caffeine fix for almost
an hour. Unless the woman shows a
heretofore unforeseen interest in things like cell phones and emergency
services, or a particularly helpful spook wanders past and kicks up a fuss, Sephie
is reasonably sure that she will be dead by then, and the only thing to greet
her regulars will be the sticky pool of red.
Sephie
frowns, or at least Sephie considers frowning.
Fine motor functions are slightly more difficult than usual. The coffee shop won’t be opened today, if she
dies. This bothers her rather a
lot—that’s years and years of her life in that coffee shop, and it seems absurd
that something so transient as death should stop her from opening it and making
cappuccinos. Maybe her spook will stand
up and take care of it, she thinks.
Spooks have done stranger things.
“I’ve
been on sabbatical for thirteen years today,” the woman announces with a serene
smile, looking down at Sephie.
She’s
been answering that for years now.
“That’s
nice, miss,” Sephie rasps, and the blood on her lips is salty.
I never understood why a girl is always suppose to be that ride or die chick that stays with a man and helps him build and become the man she deserves but a guy is never told to stay with a woman while she finds herself. A guy will always look for that perfect woman but we are suppose to settle for a building project?! Fuck that.
I so wholeheartedly love the generation of women coming up in this world. The realization that you are all stars of your own story and not a supporting actress in a mans is so important.
(and part 2!) The thought and the amazing way you tied in R's art skills to his superpower was FANTASTIC! I LOVED IT! Not to mention your other writings are just fantastic! You got me hooked with your Avatar AU and reeled me in with your Reincarnation AU and I think at this point I might as well just admitted that I've been caught, because DANG your writing is truly an inspiration! And I love it! I can't wait to see more from you! Because everything is just so creative & original & I can't wait!
Oh my God how is everyone SO N I C E what do I do with you guys? I am so delighted that you enjoy my writing, I am not a person easily flustered and you guys have me coming over like a freaking Southern belle.
i want to know more about charlie weasley’s friends. who the hell agrees to SMUGGLE A DRAGON across international borders on two days notice? who are these people that are willing to accept a dragon in a crate from a couple of small children, no questions asked? i need to know more, tell me about the antics of these mysterious flying dragon smugglers.
ESPCAD.
European Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Against Dragons.
Like PETA but with less grossness and more punk activism. And fire breathing dragons so like no one really fux with ‘em.
speaking as a biologist, i can guarantee i would show up without question to smuggle an endangered species that would otherwise be destroyed across national borders to a sanctuary on two days’ notice.
like. if a small child showed me a box containing a juvenile alligator snapping turtle and was like “you need to smuggle this across the continent to kansas or else it will be destroyed” i would be like “sure, would you like me to send you a postcard, small child”
Growing up in an abusive household is a fucking trip dude……If you’ve never had someone angrily wash a dish at you or fold a sock in your direction then how are you gonna understand why I get nervous when you quietly do the laundry, or why I ask “are you mad at me?” when you set the bag of groceries down too hard? It’s a totally different way of living and it impacts you long after you’ve left the situation.
And got a bunch of compliments and fic requests and y’all are too good to me.
Newcomers! Welcome to the blog! Please collect a top hat and join the party. My inbox is always open for fic prompts or talking, I occasionally write stuff and there’s a tag for that. I do feel obliged to inform you that if you’re here exclusively for Les Mis stuff, I am ADHD with a diverse set of interests and it shows. But nonetheless, welcome!
Also! Since we hit a hundred’s landmark, I usually post something special, so I’m gonna put up some original work, yes?
i’m watching this documentary about halloween and there’s a part where they’re explaining that ghost stories got really popular around the civil war no one could really deal with how many people went off and died and
the narrator just said
“the first ghost stories were really about coming home”
IIRC, the Civil War also played a huge part in forming the modern American conception of heaven as this nice, domestic place where you’re reunited with your loved ones. People (particularly mothers) responded to the trauma of brother-killing-brother by imagining an afterlife in which families would once again be happy together.
(also not doing this in the correct tag-style, because I wanna KNOW— )What documentary is this? Or is there more than one? Any books on the subject? THIS IS FASCINATING.
cool (ghost) story, bro.
reblogging because, as a us history phd student, i want to say YAY for how much of this is totally on point. i also want to rec the book where a lot of this is covered very, very well, which is Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”
a lot of books on the Civil War are deadly dull because they’re about battles and shit, but as a transformative moment in mindset and ideology, it becomes *fascinating*
the other book I’d even more highly rec is David W. Blight’s “Race and Reunion,” which is about how the “(white) brother against (white) brother” image of the war was invented and how throwing African Americans to the merciless viciousness of post-Reconstruction racist whites was part of constructing this “oh everybody was white men and everybody was noble let’s celebrate them all” approach to Civil War remembrance
very good stuff
Thank you! This looks like exactly the sort of reading I’m after! *adds to wish list*
Also, look for David Blights recordings of his Yale lecture series on The Civil War. 21 hours of class lectures, and its FASCINATING. He barely touches on the battles other than to use them as timestamps as to what was going on. Most of it focuses on what the mindset of everyone was going into the war, and what happened on the way out. It’s an amazing series that will change your entire perception of the war - how it happened, and how it wasn’t going to be possible to avoid it, because of the inherent evil of slavery and how it was destroying damn near *everyone* except rich white people.
