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

A request from @littlestartopaz: Polaris AU set in the American Revolution?

AHAHAHAHA YES.  This turned into kind of an ode to Ade North, the woman in command of Polaris, and I have no regrets.

So Polaris is a covert part of the colonial army, stealing patriots out from under the noses of the redcoats.  Ade North—North for the star, North for the sky, North for freedom—is a grim-eyed escaped slave, and she knows the risks of what she’s about to do, but she storms straight into the base outside New York City. The General—slave-owner, she diagnoses immediately, at a glance—isn’t the first one she finds, but rather a hot-tempered red-haired captain who grins at her when she tells him that I just walked through gunfire to get here, boy, do you think I’m about to run because someone might try and hang me?  He vouches for her, and some strings are pulled, and…well.  Her old master is a Tory.  She’s not afraid of taking advantage of double-standards when they’re held out to her in both hands.  And Ade North has never in her life backed down.

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Right, so I wrote this a while back for @twistedangelsays‘ birthday in May, and then she asked me today to post some F/F smut after I posted this ExR smut earlier today.  Max is the main character from this novel and Lessa is her girlfriend, details are included in the tag.

Lessa laughed giddily as Mercury squad spilled through the door, all of us bursting with the adrenaline rush.  The mission had been declared a wash while we were in the field, but we’d still had a closer brush with gunfire than I liked.

“All right, everyone,” I said.  “Debrief with the marshal or Beck at some point in the next couple of hours.  Sorry to have dragged you out for nothing.”

“Ah, don’t worry so much, piti bòs, it was fun,” Elijah said, eyes dancing as he hooked an arm around Miles’ shoulders and cuffed him cheerily up the back of the head.  Miles looked offended, one hand still pressed to a sluggishly bleeding graze to his bicep. “C’mon, Four, let’s go get that arm looked at.  Maybe Janey will meet us there.” Miles allowed himself to be dragged away without much of a fuss and Zara grinned fondly after them.

“Mm,” she said.  “I’m going to go eat something, do a quick debrief, and then see if I can round up my boys and fuck them through the floor.  Y’all have a nice night.”

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50 “Not so Nice” OC or FR Asks

catbatart:

thedovahcat:

flynneware:

dendingo:

wanderers-of-sornieth:

List your OCs in the tags or link your lair so that people can ask you!

1. What is one word to shut them up?

2. What is the thing they feel the most guilty about?

3. What is the worst pain they’ve ever experienced?

4. Describe their worst nightmare.

5. List 3 fears; one “surface level” fear, one “repressed” fear, and one “deep dark” fear.

6. What is something that never fails to make them feel sick?

7. What feature (physical or otherwise) do they hate most about themselves?

8. Do they have anything that triggers them?

9. What is their greatest physical weakness?

10. What is their greatest mental weakness?

11. Do they have any vices?

12. Have they ever done something illegal? What was it?

13. Which of the 7 Deadly Sins best describes them?

14. Are they prone to outbursts (of violence, extreme emotion… exc… )?

15. Who do they hate the most?

16. Is there anyone who makes them feel inferior?

17. What sound always gives them a headache?

18. Is there a certain flavor that disgusts them?

19. Do they consider themselves ugly?

20. Do they consider themselves unloveable?

21. What is something that causes them great anxiety?

22. Do they have any mental illnesses?

23. Have they ever been assaulted/abused/raped?

24. Do they fear the possibility of being assaulted/abused/raped?

25. Have they ever been betrayed by someone they thought they could trust?

26. Have they ever been seriously injured?

27. How many times have they been in the hospital?

28. Is there a certain type of person that disgusts them?

29. Does what they cannot see scare them?

30. Have they ever been bullied?

31. Do they have self-confidence or self-image issues?

32. Do they have a bad relationship with their parents?

33. Have they ever been in a relationship that didn’t work out so well?

34. Have they ever self harmed?

35. If they could change one thing about themselves, what would it be?

36. Are they in control of their emotions, or are their emotions in control of them?

37. Have they ever had their freedom taken away?

38. Have they ever been imprisoned?

39. Have they ever been accused of something they didn’t do?

40. Do they often blame themselves for other people’s problems?

41. Do they get sick often?

42. Are they comfortable with where they are in life?

43. Do they wish that they could change their pasts?

44. What’s one thing they wish they could do more often, but can’t?

45. What is the emotion they most commonly experience?

46. Have they ever contemplated suicide?

47. Have they ever gone so far as to attempt suicide?

48. Is there anyone that they would willingly kill?

49. If [name] was put into ______ situation, they’d rather die than live to see it through.

50. Create your own!

Ask anyone anything!

Please ask these for Kai and Rhys; these are fantastic for development! 

My kinda meme

Sure why not. I’m terrible at answering prompts these days but heck, maybe.

(via dyinghistoric)

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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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.

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.

Stealin’ Kisses from Your Misses

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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