The Suffering Never Ends

You owe me one, sis.

Accidentally swallows the coin I was buried with and gets left on the dock for eternity because I couldn't pay the ferryman

Do you have any tips to stop cringing at/hating your own writing? Thanks!

yeah actually: write cringe shit on purpose

do you know what so fucking cringe? superheroes. most people irl associate them with five year old boys and gamer bros who like excluding people based on whether they know how many Robins there are. you MIGHT get lucky and have them associate you with shippers and fandom folks. when my brand new housemate said to me ‘oh so I hear you like superheroes?’ I felt my soul fucking evacuate my body.

anyway so I took my favourite cringe genre and made it more cringe. I stripped out most of the action and made it about melodrama. about romance. about three line prompts centred on feelings. and I filled a whole blog with it. thousands of prompts, tens of thousands of words of nothing but the most cringe-inducing, self-indulgent, emotional twaddle. I write it fast, on the fly--for most of this blog’s lifespan I was producing two prompts a day, and there was no time to edit out the yikes or the badly placed commas or the overwrought betrayal. I’ve written cancel-worthy smut prompts and twee little tooth-aching cuteness. I’ve written so much junk that no one in their right mind would show another living soul, and published it in front of more than EIGHT THOUSAND PEOPLE. 

it’s an inoculation process (get your flu shot, kids). if you write cringe shit on purpose, you mind a lot less when you write cringe shit by accident. in fact, sometimes you start to enjoy the cringe even in your serious work, because you start to recognise a fundamental truth: everything is cringe. purple prose is cringe. romances are cringe. redemption arcs are cringe. em dashes are cringe. superheroes are cringe. 

you will always be writing something cringe. always. even when you’re a bestselling author, you’ll write something and think ‘oh god that’s so fucking cringe’. the difference between you now and you in that future is that you in the future has written so much more cringe shit. you will be (semi) cringe immune. you have survived the cringe before and you will survive the cringe again. 

so keep writing. keep cringing too, but most importantly: just keep writing. it’s the only surefire cure. 

hope this helps!

The Boy Who Lived

HARRY: I shouldn’t have survived – it was my destiny to die – even Dumbledore thought so – and yet I lived. I beat Voldemort. All these people – my parents, Fred, the Fallen Fifty – and it’s me that gets to live? How is that? All this damage – and it’s my fault.

GINNY: They were killed by Voldemort.

HARRY: But if I’d stopped him sooner? All that blood on my hands. And now our son has been taken too–

GINNY: He’s not dead. Do you hear me Harry? He’s not dead.

HARRY: The Boy Who Lived. How many people have to die for the Boy Who Lived?

- HP&TCH, Act Four, Scene Six

We learned in Philosopher’s Stone that Harry’d deepest desire was to be reunited with his family. To have a family. And we see at the end of Deathly Hallows, that he’s achieved this desire. He’s married to Ginny and has three children. His children. For the first time in his life, he’s surrounded by loving blood relatives. And you know that makes him happy, happier than anything else.

But deep down–or maybe not so deep down–he doesn’t think he deserves that happiness. He looks at all the people who didn’t grow up to have families of their own. The people who lost family members, who lost siblings, parents, children, partners. And then he looks at what he has and, believing so tragically that the deaths rest on his own shoulders, thinks he doesn’t deserve it. One of Harry’s central motivating forces is his desire to save people, and he wasn’t able to save everyone.

So, hold that in your mind as you read the next bit.

ALBUS: The poor orphan who went on to save us all – so may I say – on behalf of wizarding world kind. How grateful we are for your heroism. Should we bow now or will a curtsey do?

HARRY: Albus, please – you know, I’ve never wanted gratitude.

ALBUS: But right now I’m overflowing with it – it must be the kind gift of this mouldy blanket that did it…

HARRY: Mouldy blanket?

ALBUS: What did you think would happen? We’d hug. I’d tell you I always loved you? What?

HARRY: (finally losing his temper) You know what? I’m done with being made responsible for your unhappiness. At least you’ve got a dad. Because I didn’t, okay?

ALBUS: And you think that was unlucky? I don’t.

HARRY: You wish me dead?

ALBUS: No! I just wish you weren’t my dad.

HARRY: (seeing red) Well, there are times I wish you weren’t my son.

(There’s a silence. Albus nods. Pause. Harry realises what he’s said.)

HARRY: No, I didn’t mean that…

- HP&TCC, Act One, Scene Seven

Harry breaks right after Albus implies that he’s never loved him. And then again when Albus says he wishes Harry wasn’t his father. Because Albus, unknowingly, has just confirmed what Harry believes deep down. He’s not worthy of his family’s love. He doesn’t deserve them. He doesn’t deserve that happiness. He didn’t even know what he was saying to Albus as he said it.

And I’m thinking–the process Harry goes through in the course of the play, his efforts to see Albus for who he really is–that has as much to do with healing himself as it does to do with mending his relationship with Albus. By learning how to be a good parent to Albus, he’s proving to himself that he’s worthy of being loved.

friendly and gentle reminder that if there is a thing you’ve been wanting to make and have been putting off because you don’t know if anyone will like it

DO THE DAMN THING

we doing self indulgence 2020. make stuff. put it out in the world. it don’t get notes? who cares, you put a thing that literally did not exist before out there. keep doin the thing. do what makes u happy

*saving this for later 😎*

queer books that didn’t disappoint me the way everything else has. please enjoy.

Imagine being Vanya, no memory of anything at all and stuck in 1963, seduces a farmers wife, gets chased by 3 swedish dudes shooting at her, discovers she has powers and uses them on said swedish dudes, hides in the corn field all night alone, then suddenly some little feral school boy comes out of nowhere and is like ;3 hi vanya, i’m ur brother my name is literally just a number missed u xx

legend says that if you go to a mirror and say “beep beep richie” three times richie tozier will appear behind you and make a slightly offensive joke about your mother

thanks for the tag @originaleggsdreamerbonk :D

Rules: Share your lock screen, home screen, and the last song you listened to.

I was tagged by @aknymph ❤️

Happy Friday 😚 I'm tagging @aelin-myfireheart-queen @22emmmmmm

i love that sirius black escapes azkaban and his first 2 instincts are:

seek vengeance  

buy expensive gifts for school children