Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

Deorum (Of Gods)

All right, so, I hit 400 followers and as promised, here is Deorum!  This is just the first part, obviously, because…uh…I’m me, so naturally this is pushing 30 pages.  Also: Deorum is Latin for ‘of (the) gods,’ Jack is…not the Christian god, nor is he Jesus.  I thought that was apparent, but there was much confusion in my writing class so  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.  And for once, the curtains are not just blue, everything has a meaning, EVERYTHING.  Feel free to hit me up if you want a detailed breakdown.

“A woman I don’t know is boiling tea the Indian way in my kitchen,” Jack Deorum hissed into his phone, keeping one eye on the red-lipped woman at his counter. He was as far away as he could manage while staying within visual range, taking care to keep his voice down, and the woman seemed unperturbed.  Her hands were graceful, flashing quick and lovely about the white porcelain of his favorite mug and the black-brushed steel of his electric kettle.  Her masses of coiling black hair spilled down her back, stark as paint against the drape of her rose and gold sari, cut in a South Indian style.  Her feet were bare and delicate.

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I’m Taking A Poll

words-writ-in-starlight:

words-writ-in-starlight:

All right, so, those of you who’ve been around long enough may or may not recall that my practice when I hit a round number of followers is to post some original writing (see: Methods of Inheritance and Sabbatical).  And I’m coming up on 400, so I’ll be doing that again!  But!  I have…a lot of original fiction.  A lot of original fiction.  So I’m going to offer a list of options, and you lot can tell me which one you’d like to see!  To vote, you can reply to this post or reblog it, or send me a message, although I’d prefer the ask box over a private message just because it’ll be easier to collate the answers that way.  For the novels, obviously, you’d be getting an excerpt, probably 2-5 pages.  Any short stories, though, you’d get all of.

Polaris: the revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel (as yet incomplete).  Like.  There’s more detail, obviously.  But that’s pretty much what we’re dealing with there.  There are a bunch of LGBT characters and a few superpowers and a revolution, thus: revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel.  Tag is here if you want more detail.

Falls the Shadow: my best beloved novel about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, led by Sam, the Horseman of Death and Antichrist.  This one’s complete, but it is H E F T Y at 250K words.  I’m editing it down.  Tag is here, but no one asks me about it, so there’s not much there.  First of a trilogy.

Battalion: the novel where angels happened and fucked everything up, and humans have been fucking them over in response for about 70 years (incomplete).  Yep.  That’s here, and there is exactly one post.

Stories From the Second War: a triad of short stories technically set in the FtS universe, about Heaven’s war against the Nephilim.  Um…they’re dark.  The Nephilim are monstrous.  But I think they might be some of my favorite writing I’ve done.  They are Tell All the Truth (But Tell It Slant) and To Fight Aloud, Is Very Brave (Uniforms of Snow), both from the perspective of the leader of the Nephilim, and The Stillness in the Air (Between Heaves of Storm), from the perspective of her hunting partner.  I’d put all three on here as a set, because I think they work best that way.

Deorum (Of Gods): a short story I wrote for that writing class I hated.  Jack, the main character, lives in a city populated partly by mortals and partly by the gods of the world’s pantheons–Idunn owns a coffee shop, Apollo teaches art at an elementary school, Ninkasi runs a bar, and dark things live in the woods.  Jack attracts more gods than he’s strictly comfortable with, and they all seem to know him remarkably well….  I don’t know if it’s my best work in terms of quality, but I definitely think it’s up there as the most fun.  This is about forty pages, so I’d have to post it piecemeal.  

So…yeah.  Anyone have a preference?

OKAY KIDS.

I have reached 400 followers, but I have a tie, which means that this is SUDDEN DEATH.

Polaris (AKA “revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers”) and Deorum (AKA “Please let Jack sleep”) are tied for the top voted piece.  Please vote for your preference, summaries are above.

The votes are in!  I will begin posting Deorum today.

I’m Taking A Poll

All right, so, those of you who’ve been around long enough may or may not recall that my practice when I hit a round number of followers is to post some original writing (see: Methods of Inheritance and Sabbatical).  And I’m coming up on 400, so I’ll be doing that again!  But!  I have…a lot of original fiction.  A lot of original fiction.  So I’m going to offer a list of options, and you lot can tell me which one you’d like to see!  To vote, you can reply to this post or reblog it, or send me a message, although I’d prefer the ask box over a private message just because it’ll be easier to collate the answers that way.  For the novels, obviously, you’d be getting an excerpt, probably 2-5 pages.  Any short stories, though, you’d get all of.

Polaris: the revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel (as yet incomplete).  Like.  There’s more detail, obviously.  But that’s pretty much what we’re dealing with there.  There are a bunch of LGBT characters and a few superpowers and a revolution, thus: revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel.  Tag is here if you want more detail.

Falls the Shadow: my best beloved novel about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, led by Sam, the Horseman of Death and Antichrist.  This one’s complete, but it is H E F T Y at 250K words.  I’m editing it down.  Tag is here, but no one asks me about it, so there’s not much there.  First of a trilogy.

Battalion: the novel where angels happened and fucked everything up, and humans have been fucking them over in response for about 70 years (incomplete).  Yep.  That’s here, and there is exactly one post.

Stories From the Second War: a triad of short stories technically set in the FtS universe, about Heaven’s war against the Nephilim.  Um…they’re dark.  The Nephilim are monstrous.  But I think they might be some of my favorite writing I’ve done.  They are Tell All the Truth (But Tell It Slant) and To Fight Aloud, Is Very Brave (Uniforms of Snow), both from the perspective of the leader of the Nephilim, and The Stillness in the Air (Between Heaves of Storm), from the perspective of her hunting partner.  I’d put all three on here as a set, because I think they work best that way.

Deorum (Of Gods): a short story I wrote for that writing class I hated.  Jack, the main character, lives in a city populated partly by mortals and partly by the gods of the world’s pantheons–Idunn owns a coffee shop, Apollo teaches art at an elementary school, Ninkasi runs a bar, and dark things live in the woods.  Jack attracts more gods than he’s strictly comfortable with, and they all seem to know him remarkably well….  I don’t know if it’s my best work in terms of quality, but I definitely think it’s up there as the most fun.  This is about forty pages, so I’d have to post it piecemeal.  

So…yeah.  Anyone have a preference?

Who wants to talk about superpowers with drawbacks?

ME.  Everything is under a cut because I’m trying not to inflict too much mulling-over-of-plot on y’all.  But I need to hash some details out re: Polaris and Tumblr is now my wall at which to throw things.

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lathori asked: ♫ Billy/Colin (it didn't say it couldn't be one of YOUR ships)

You are correct, I did not say that.  But you realize that now I have to EXPLAIN this shit, right?

Okay, so, Billy Johr and Colin Ramsey are from my novel Falls the Shadow, which is the 350 page monstrosity I wrote during sophomore year and which I am now editing to be sent out to an agent.  Short version: Sam Lightworth, their pseudo-adopted daughter (they’re the two Witnesses), is the Antichrist and Horseman of Death, and her brother Oz, their pseudo-adopted son, is the Horseman of Pestilence.  War and Famine are kicking around too, but they don’t really matter as much here.  The POINT is that Billy and Colin accidentally raised an Antichrist and the world barely missed ending.  That’s it, that’s the book.  And then…well.  Billy and Colin.  They are canonically in love, and have been since they hunted together as twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings.  Billy, now sixty-three and no longer spry enough to hunt himself, is an archivist and weaponeer for every hunter of supernatural things.  And the now-sixty Colin…well, Colin’s a Catholic priest…so…they’re not together and they never will be.  And Adler is never going to forgive me for that.  I’m sorry.  Please don’t hunt me with torches.

I put my music on shuffle and got I’m So Sorry by Imagine Dragons and…um…yeah, actually, this is a snippet from while the Almostpocalypse was happening.  I’m…so sorry.

“Preacher,” Billy said quietly, and Colin didn’t look at him, still standing at the edge of the porch and staring down the road.  He didn’t need to look to know that Billy would step forward, stand next to him until their shoulders pressed together, the once-red hair steely in the corner of his vision.  Billy was a broad, solid warmth at his side, half a head taller and steady as ages, and Colin let their shoulders bump together, acknowledgement that he was there.

“Did you hear it?” he asked, barely more than a murmur, and Billy nodded slowly beside him, looking out in the same direction—south, to Nevada, to where the Horsemen were, miles and hours away.  The scream had come from nowhere, from everywhere, like standing directly beneath a roll of thunder, but the voice had been Sam’s.  “The others,” Colin said, almost blank.

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sroloc--elbisivni asked: *whispers* your original fic slays me it is lovely and gorgeous and the characters are so alive and vivid and downright delightful would it be presumptuous to ask for some of your favorite headcanons re: Polaris characters?

H O N E Y, I love you so much right now, fucking YES you can ask me about my original writing.  Original writing is everything to me, and my ridiculous gay revolutionaries are just…I love them a lot.  Also the best part is that I’m the author, fuck the man, my headcanons are fucking CANON.  OKAY.  This got HELLA LONG, I’m so sorry, I ramble about this shit.  Let this be a lesson about asking writers about their original characters: it leads to LENGTHY responses.

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5 Headcanons AU Meme

Prompt from @littlestartopaz​: Max and Lessa role reversal?  (Reminder that Max and Lessa are the main characters of my novel Polaris, explained in more detail here.)

• Okay so, in this world, Max grows up Margaret Stone, with long hair and makeup and heels and money.  She wants to strip off her skin.   Lessa, full name unknown, on the other hand, is on the street at eleven and picked up by Sebastian McCoy, MD, on his way to Polaris’ newest base.  She’s a little too timid to be a revolutionary, at first, but she takes to it like a duck to water after a little bit of an adjustment period.
  
• Lessa never joins Mercury squad, she’s not cut out for life as a spy and she has no talent for hacking.  Instead, when she’s fifteen she joins Mars squad, the strike team, and starts taking point on their operations, throwing bolts of electricity rather than bullets.  She’s promoted to Mars Prime at nineteen, and she has a reputation for being the gentlest professional soldier anyone’s ever met.  
• There’s also a couple of stories about her blowing the power for whole city grids, or turning on the sprinklers in a building and using the water as a conductor to kill everyone on the floor.
• Under Lessa, Ursa Major’s Mars squad gets a new nickname.  Blitzkrieg.  It means lightning war.
• On the one hand, Polaris does a lot worse in this universe.  Having a technopath to network a continent-spanning rebellion is invaluable, and without such an advantage, they lose lives, they lose bases, more than once they almost lose everything.  There is no secure intranet linking their family of thousands, there is no safe way to smuggle those who don’t want to fight out of the country.  Fight or die is the unspoken option given to every new recruit, and those few who are desperate enough to attempt to leave the country on their own learn how true it is.  Polaris is harder, every base dependent on only itself, with no safe way to reach out for help, and its people are angrier, with an ever-growing ‘missing’ list of those who can neither be contacted nor confirmed dead.
• On the other, Polaris does a lot better in this universe, because when Margaret is nine, she discovers that she can make any computer do anything she tells it to, just by touching it.  When she’s twelve, and Lessa is still years from getting kicked out, Margaret starts funneling information from her father’s system onto a private hard drive so encrypted the NSA couldn’t crack it with their best men.  She does research, lots of research, and hunts down a boy at her school whose family is on one of the lists.  She tells him, warns him, and says, “Polaris.  Go to Polaris.  Take them this.”  The moment the hard drive is connected to a Polaris system, their database is flooded with more national secrets than they’ve been able to get in a decade, every block of code signed with a simple MAX.  Marshal North has to sit down, and she laughs and laughs until she’s breathless.
• Margaret is twenty-two and ferocious with being trapped like an animal in a cage when she’s caught up in a Polaris operation.  She gets taken hostage by a girl with long blonde hair and a grim look in her eye, one hand wrapped around her throat as the girl says, “Sorry, Miss Stone, but it is what it is.  Tell your bodyguards to drop their guns, or I’ll put so much electricity through you you’ll wish you’d just been struck by lightning.”
• Margaret bares her teeth and looks as wild as any of the rebels when she says, “If you take me with you, I can get you another load of my father’s data before we leave, and more that I’ve hidden around the city.  it’ll make the hard drive look like nothing.”
• The blonde girl is so startled she almost drops her hostage in a pile on the ground.  “How did you–”
• “I sent the first one.”
  
• “Max,” Lessa breathes, and gives a feral grin of her own.  “You’ve got a deal.”
  

speckeltail asked: okay, so, an au where your ocs all work shitty retail jobs

Oh dear Christ.  Okay, let’s see, I don’t make OC’s for fic as a rule, and my OC’s for my original writing all tend to be really aggressive people, this should be fun.  I’ll just pick five at random.

• Sam Lightworth, Horseman of Death and unwilling Antichrist and my fave: she’s the best salesperson in the house, no one is disputing this, she could sell light switches to the Amish and matchboxes in Hell so they’re not going to fire her, but she’s also on so much probation always.  A short list of highlights from the notes in Sam’s file:
  
• punched a customer in the nose for flicking water at her
• found a customer rifling through the shirts she’d just spent an hour folding and almost broke their fingers
• responded to a crying child by setting him on a shelf and telling him that if he wasn’t good she’d sell him (in her defense, it worked)
• threw a grown man into a wall so hard she knocked him out when he tried to grab her ass (the manager doesn’t know how she managed it and doesn’t WANT to know, okay, he deals with too much shit to ask how she sent someone flying without a finger laid on them)
• was found in store at opening with what looked suspiciously like a hellhound (there is a sign, okay, it’s very unambiguous, no pets allowed)

• Max, no last name, my spy-slash-technopath from this novel: she used to work on the floor but she’s shit at selling things and only slightly better at giving directions, so they shoved her in a glorified janitor’s closet with the security system and told her to keep it running.  She helps make sure there’s never any video evidence of Sam’s antics.

• Gwynion, erstwhile Prince of the Unseelie Court and ex-assassination victim, because we need a guy in here somewhere: he’s very polite, which has him one up on Sam, and very efficient, which has him one up on Max, but he’s also…look, the manager isn’t accusing anyone of anything, but no one ever found that one woman who tried to grope Gwynion, okay, the manager’s not saying she disappeared.  He’s just saying they never found her.  There’s a difference.

• Sephie, from this: honestly Sephie doesn’t deserve this, Sephie deserves better than this bullshit and these coworkers, she is a Normal Human trying to pay rent and she needs a drink.  Nonetheless, she gets along famously with everyone and doesn’t mind working the register since Sam isn’t trusted to do it and Gwynion seems prone to causing equipment fry-age.  Sephie is also gunning for the managerial position when their current boss inevitably caves, and stands to make a tidy sum in the pool given the newest hire.

• Angharad “Harry” Ainsel, from this (parts are noted ‘first,’ ‘second,’ ‘third’): the new hire.  The manager almost cried when she walked in, because no one who wanders around with that strange bone crown is going to be a good thing.  She’s almost as good as Sam at the sales end of things, but she’s also making people sign things that don’t look like receipts and has offered to exchange two return items for changeling children.  Also, the bike rack is for bikes, and the no pets allowed thing should cover the bike rack, as far as the manager knows, which means the warhorse is definitely contraindicated.

• Bonus sixth headcanon: the manager quits within three weeks of Harry’s hire (with the apparent intent to move to Bangkok or somewhere similarly distant), Harry and Sephie shake hands as soon as Sephie’s signed her new managerial contract, and the Huntsmaster leaves in the middle of her shift and doesn’t come back to work.  Sephie, when asked how she knows Harry and could she get Sam one of those nice daggers she carried, shrugs and says that her girlfriend has contacts.

Sabbatical

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.

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Stealin’ Kisses from Your Misses

words-writ-in-starlight:

For @littlestartopaz, with the prompt “Your technomancer has a nightmare about the electric-user and decides checking on her is the best way to calm down. But the electric user wakes up before she can leave.”

All right kids quick rundown of the shit you need to know (because these are characters from one of the as-yet-untitled novels I’m writing, not fandom-access characters).  It’s set in a near future where…basically Trump wins the presidency and sets himself up as a dictator.  We’re about 18 years down the line from the guy (Stone) getting elected and shit’s gone to hell in a pretty big way.  People are getting deported, people are reporting their neighbors to the police, whole families are vanishing overnight.  If you’re LGBT, non-white, non-Christian, an immigrant, or an outspoken supporter of any of those things, you’re in deep shit and a candidate for being disappeared.  The novel revolves around Max, who is part of a rebel organization called Polaris (largely made up of the people listed above) and who is one of a few people who’ve started to pop up with superhuman abilities.  The existence of these people—she calls them ‘blues’ and since she was the first one Polaris found, they go with it—is pretty much an urban legend, largely because the government has that shit on lock.  Max’s ability allows her to manipulate technology with her mind and make it do…basically whatever she wants.  Her (eventual) girlfriend Lessa Stone is the daughter of the Trump-equivalent dictator, who broke Max out of a holding cell and joined Polaris.  Lessa, besides being gay as FUCK, is also a blue, with the ability to generate a massive electrical current in her body and project it as lightning bolts.  So basically I’m writing a novel that can be summarized as “girlfriends with superpowers join a cast of LGBT people and PoC to smash the patriarchy.”  This snippet takes place sometime between Lessa joining Polaris and the two of them getting together properly (Lessa has Some Issues to sort out regarding her sexuality, shockingly).

I shuddered awake, panting.  The room was black around me, nothing to reorient myself, and my hands shook as I reached out and fumbled with the lamp on the floor next to my cot until the bulb flared to life.

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Reblog for the next day even though I posted this at a perfectly reasonable hour because Adler told me to start doing that.  And she has learned that if you needle me about my writing until I’m really flustered and then immediately hit me with a command about my writing, the command gets followed.