Here's Some Of The @jstor Articles I've Found Really Interesting In This Line Of Study:

I SAY I WANT YOU INSIDE ME AND YOU SPLIT ME OPEN WITH A KNIFE: web weaving for Graves x Warden

Le Cid, Pierre Corneille tr. A.S Kline / Brutus, The Buttress / The Prestige, Hanif Abdurraqib / The Good Fight, Ada Limón / Luis Caballero / vulnerability, a.j. / Catherynne M. Valente / The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison / Let Us Believe in The Dawn of The Cold Season, Forugh Farrokhzad tr. Sholeh Wolpé / The Book of X, Sarah Rose Etter / Jenny Holzer / Love via Purpose, I.B. Vyache / Closer, Nine Inche Nails / The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, Emilie Autumn / Start Here, Caitlyn Sieh / To Kill a Kingdom, Alexandra Chirsto / I'm Not Calling You a Lair, Florence + The Machine / Bloodsport, Yves Olade

No one wants to work anymore. All kids these days want is to physically transform into animals. Bones cracking, breaking, splintering apart, stitching together into exhilaratingly new shapes. Hair, all kinds hair, various fluids and oils and whatnot. Ragged-lip maws dripping with alien teeth, crowning in teething agony like the birth of an infant god. Gore-streaked visages howling in pagan delight by the pale light of the moon, etc. No work ethic. He who makes a beast of himself takes away the pain of clocking in tomorrow

He likes to mess around with his scribbly hair ✨💖

They are having a moment

—Maria Michela Sassi, "Can we hope to understand how the Greeks saw their world?" (pub. Aeon) [ID in ALT]

Writeblr Introduction

Dotted in secret stars and whispered moons lies The Warden O' Wyrd; too bright smiles and sharp eyes linger on her skin, miasma orbiting their visage. When dusk's hands sweep fluttering eyes closed her shackles, in turn, loosen.

Greetings and welcome all, I am Wardenwyrd - connoisseur of messy queers, the freaky & occult, and all things speculative fiction! I am freshly new to Writeblr and am keen to dig my claws so fellow denizens of Writeblr interact if you enjoy my vibes < 3

Open to ask and tag games !

◈What I write ◈

Anything and absolutely everything speculative, weird horror, all shapes and forms of queerness, and a metric ton of worldbuilding.

Genres: Fantasy (Low, high, dark, fairy tale-esque, etc), Sci-Fi, Paranormal, Romance, Horror, Mystery

Fantastical, often ethereal and treacherous worlds flavoured with flowery prose

Queer, neurodivergent, and disabled characters and themes. All kinds of diversity really. Always looking to broaden and grow my noggin' with wisdom

Gender queer characters. An UNBELIEVABLE amount of dyed hair and pronounces.

Body horror: elegant body horror; gross, grimy body horror; wonderfully queer body horror 'til I burst at the seams; all sorts. Twisting of the body into something other than human as a form of beauty my beloved < 3 < 3

Characters who desperately need therapy (That would be my fault)

Rich settings and worlds. Give me intricate magic systems !!! give me ecology that could be shown in a nature documentary !!!

🌔About Me 🌒

Goblin in my (late) teens. I've been writing for a whiiiile but started really getting into it about half a decade ago. I will ravenously consume all forms of creative media.

⭐Likes ⭐

Favourite colour: Purple my beloved Favourite band: Mili (I'm so normal about them) Favourite genre/s: Gothic lit, Fantasy, Horror romance, whimsical fairies Fav insect: Moths/Butterflies

Stats:

Creative writing college student

Panromantic Ace | Queering my gender to the max

English (Regrettably)

Autism kreachure

Revolving door of hyperfixations on science-y stuff

Purple hair (Not beating the stereotype allegations)

WIPs

[Note: I am very bad at deciding on WIP names]

Prisma

My surreal fantasy WIP comprised of a collection of different stories linked by a unifying setting.

Colour-Coded to the max. Each central story focuses on a character assigned a colour, differing in tone, POV, and focus. Main three are purple, blue, and red.

Literal becomes figurative, and figurative literal

Charms and incantations of old swirl in from afar, weaving our hands together with something much deeper than flesh – a curious sentiment oozing from the recesses of Damsel’s cloak as the feeling of moss and stone wove through my veins; cold and refreshing.

◉

‘What absurdity’, The Arbiter would think to himself. After all, those carmine red eyes of his delve into the primaeval madness: in their muddy depths lies the shivering madness - Fear. From fear is the knowledge wrenched from uncertainty and bloodshot eyes. Dread is the light; tugging on world-weary watchers. 

Sort of portal fantasy, sort of not. The stories in this WIP span across many eras and places, yet often find themselves connecting and mingling. Incredibly queer.

Main characters:

MC of Red, Jack Pronouns: He/Him Bnuuy ass trans Victorian boy. Pasty and WILL combust in the sun. Autism creature. He gets a himbo bf and sick asf t-surgery scars as a treat &lt; 3 Character Playlist

MC of Blue, Hel Pronouns: Any/All seemingly innocent girl but remove the innocent and girl part. Kind of an eldritch horror after a character arc but like, that's the good ending. So old surnames weren't a thing in the era they're from. Character Playlist

MC of Purple, Dorothea Pronouns: She/They Gatekeep, Gaslight, Girlboss. Autistic adhd precocious mess who WILL make it your problem. Genuinely manipulative but has great hair so it's fine. Character Playlist

Other notable mentions

[Note: I will elaborate on all of these later]

Witch WIP

My beloved blorbos < 3 Once I figure out how to frame and present it in a more refined way I like I shall be posting about this.

Personal & Cultural struggle within a fantasy context | Disability & Identity as a main theme | Aroace protagonist and Queerplatonic relationship | Magic inspired by folklore and myth | Found family

Low Fantasy setting in a somewhat alternate earth

Sprawling magic system

Conventional fantasy groups but with a spin: revamping those vibes

Witches aren't just funny flying women but genuinely inhuman creatures with spicy shit going on

Demons and angels but: demon is the colloquial term for a class of magical beasts characterised by dense essence, not like hell demons. Angels are living algorithms born from patterns and don't have an actual association to any gods.

MC Playlists:

Branwen | Ingram

Five Steps From Hell

Biblically Accurate Angelic-Flavoured paranormal apocalypse

Autistic MC

More horror oriented than action

Lots of vibes.

MC becoming something not very human, but they're more worried that they aren't worried too much about it

I've got some dastardly plans for this one. Vibes and atmosphere whilst the world falls apart and neurodivergence is a great combo.

Unicorns don’t seem to have many speculations regarding the afterlife, and certainly the concept of spooks and vengeful spirits would seem foreign to such laid-back creatures - but of the softer kinds of hauntings, one wonders. With such a strong love of herd and home shown in life, might they not wish to watch over those things even after they’re gone?

Idk

Drafting: The Theory of Shitty First Drafts

Writing books often exhort you to “write a shitty first draft,” but I always resisted this advice. After all,

I was already writing shitty drafts, even when I tried to write good ones. Why go out of my way to make them shittier?

A shitty first draft just kicks the can down the road, doesn’t it? Sooner or later, I’d have to write a good draft—why put it off?

If I wrote without judging what I wrote, how would I make any creative choices at all?

That first draft inevitably obscured my original vision, so I wanted it to be at least slightly good.

Writing something shitty meant I was shitty.

So for years, I kept writing careful, cramped, painstaking first drafts—when I managed to write at all. At last, writing became so joyless, so draining, so agonizing for me that I got desperate: I either needed to quit writing altogether or give the shitty-first-draft thing a try.

Turns out everything I believed about drafting was wrong.

For the last six months, I’ve written all my first drafts in full-on don’t-give-a-fuck mode. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

“Shitty first draft” is a misnomer

A rough draft isn’t just a shitty story, any more than a painter’s preparatory sketch is just a shitty painting. Like a sketch, a draft is its own kind of thing: not a lesser version of the finished story, but a guide for making the finished story.

Once I started thinking of my rough drafts as preparatory sketches, I stopped fretting over how “bad” they were. Is a sketch “bad”? And actually, a rough draft can be beautiful the same way a sketch is beautiful: it has its own messy energy.

Don’t try to do everything at once

People who make complex things need to solve one kind of problem before they can solve others. A painter might need to work out where the big shapes go before they can paint the details. A writer might need to decide what two people are saying to each other before they can describe the light in the room or what those people are doing with their hands.

I’d always embraced this principle up to a point. In the early stages, I’d speculate and daydream and make messy notes. But that freedom would end as soon as I started drafting. When you write a scene, I thought, you have to start with the first word and write the rest in order. Then it dawned on me: nobody would ever see this! I could write the dialogue first and the action later; or the action first and the dialogue later; or some dialogue and action first and then interior monologue later; or I could write the whole thing like I was explaining the plot to my friend over the phone. The draft was just one very long, very detailed note to myself. Not a story, but a preparatory sketch for a story. Why not do it in whatever weird order made sense to me?

Get all your thoughts onto the page

Here’s how I used to write: I’d sit there staring at the screen and I’d think of something—then judge it, reject it, and reach for something else, which I’d most likely reject as well—all without ever fully knowing what those things were. And once you start rejecting thoughts, it’s hard to stop. If you don’t write down the first one, or the second, or the third, eventually your thought-generating mechanism jams up. You become convinced you have no thoughts at all.

When I compare my old drafts with my new ones, the old ones look coherent enough. They’re presentable as stories. But they suck as drafts, because I can’t see myself thinking in them. I have no idea what I wanted that story to be. These drafts are opaque and airless, inscrutable even to me, because a good 90% of what I was thinking while I wrote them never made it onto the page.

These days, most of my thoughts go onto the page, in one form or another. I don’t waste time figuring out how to say something, I just ask, “what are you trying to say here?” and write that down. Because this isn’t a story, it’s a plan for a story, so I just need the words to be clear, not beautiful. The drafts I write now are full of placeholders and weird meta notes, but when I read them, I can see where my mind is going. I can see what I’m trying to do. Consequently, I no longer feel like my drafts obscure my original vision. In fact, their whole purpose is to describe that vision.

Drafts are memos to future-you

To draft effectively, you need a personal drafting style or “language” to communicate with your future self (who is, of course, the author of your second draft). This language needs to record your ideas quickly so it can keep up with the pace of your imagination, but it needs to do so in a form that will make sense to you later. That’s why everyone’s drafts look different: your drafting style has to fit the way your mind works.

I’m still working mine out. Honestly, it might take a while. But recently, I started writing in fragments. That’s just how my mind works: I get pieces of sentences before I understand how to fit them together. Wrestling with syntax was slowing me down, so now I just generate the pieces and save their logical relationships for later. Drafting effectively means learning these things about yourself. And to do that, you can’t get all judgmental. You can’t fret over how you should be writing, you just gotta get it done.

Messy drafts are easier to revise

I find that drafting quickly and messily keeps the story from prematurely “hardening” into a mute, opaque object I’m afraid to change. I no longer do that thing, for instance, where I endlessly polish the first few paragraphs of a draft without moving on. Because how do you polish a bunch of fragments taped together with dashes? A draft that looks patently “unfinished” stays malleable, makes me want to dig my hands in and move stuff around.

You already have ideas

Sitting down to write a story, I used to feel this awful responsibility to create something good. Now I treat drafting simply as documenting ideas I already have—not as creation at all, but as observation and description. I don’t wait around for good words or good ideas. I just skim off whatever’s floating on the surface and write it down. It’s that which allows other, potentially better ideas to surface.

As a younger writer, my misery and frustration perpetuated themselves: suppressing so many thoughts made my writing cramped and inhibited, which convinced me I had no ideas, which made me even more afraid to write lest I discover how empty inside I really was. That was my fear, I guess: if I looked squarely at my innocent, unvetted, unvarnished ideas, I’d see how bad they truly were, and then I’d have to—what, pack up and go home? Never write again? I don’t know. But when I stopped rejecting ideas and started dumping them onto the page, the worst didn’t happen. In fact, it was a huge relief.

Next post: the practice of shitty first drafts

Ask me a question or send me feedback!

The Kelpie Pond✨️ Jaimie Whitbread